Sharing Limited Resources And A Change Of Course 2003
Sharing Limited Resources And A Change Of Course Download Pdf
22nd October 2003
James Robertson spoke from the following text in the session on this topic at the XXIX Annual Conference of the Pio Manzu International Research Centre in Rimini, Italy on 18-20 October, 2003. The overall theme of the conference was “THE ECONOMICS OF THE NOBLE PATH: FRATERNAL RIGHTS, THE CONVIVIAL SOCIETY, FAIR SHARES FOR ALL”. The conference was dedicated to the “essential figures of Ernst Schumacher and Ivan Illich, amidst many of their present-day heirs”.
For his “remarkable contribution to the promotion of a new economics grounded in social and spiritual values” James was one of a number of speakers from around the world who were invited to speak at the conference and presented with gold medals.
Further information about the Pio Manzu Centre, the conference and the award winners is in Appendix I immediately after the paper. The text of the Citation for James’ award, which was signed by Mikhail Gorbachev, is at Appendix II. Finally, the Endnotes contain information supporting the paper.
THE ROLE OF MONEY AND FINANCE Changing a Central Part of the Problem into a Central Part of the Solution
1. INTRODUCTION
Thank you for inviting me to this conference. I am honoured, and I am delighted you have dedicated it to E.F. Schumacher and Ivan Illich. I knew both of them personally, and I was one of many people who got great stimulus and support from their work in the 1970s.
Schumacher Circle organisations are now doing valuable work around the world. But we have to recognise that Schumacher’s ideas – and Illich’s insights into the systematically disabling nature of today’s institutions and professions - have hardly begun to influence mainstream agendas. The course of world development is still based on what Illich saw as the erosion of “the conditions necessary for a convivial life” and what Schumacher called the “onward stampede”.
Why is this? Was their thinking lacking in some important respect? Or have we failed to act on it?
Both Illich and Schumacher were criticised for not dealing with political and institutional aspects of change. I remember Illich responding that his task was to explain what was wrong; it was for others to take the necessary action. For him the ideas were pre-eminent. Schumacher’s view that “the task of our generation is one of metaphysical reconstruction” underlined that his priority too was to redefine the meaning of central ideas - like work. It is true – and important – that he set up the Intermediate Technology Development Group, and personally supported the Scott Bader “common ownership” company and the Soil Association. He saw these as “lifeboat institutions” - examples of reconstructed ideas in action in the spheres of technology, business and farming. But for him, like Illich, systematic institutional reconstruction to support metaphysical reconstruction, was not a personal priority.
It doesn’t make much sense to criticise Illich and Schumacher for this. Nobody can do everything. Both men knew themselves well enough to know how best to use their time and energies. We need to ask ourselves:
- why have we, who share their vision of a more people-centred and ecological world, failed to adapt the institutions of society to it? and
- what should we do about that now?
In this paper, taking government and the money system as a case study, I shall try to outline a possible answer to that question.
2. THE INSTITUTIONS OF GOVERNMENT AND MONEY
Established institutions embody dominant ideas, and transmit them as norms of desired behaviour. For example, today’s economic institutions embody the idea that work means a job with an employer and that normal people should work that way. But, as pioneer systems thinkers in the 1970s like Stafford Beer pointed out, institutions are dynamic systems programmed for survival. So they act as barriers to change, obstructing the conversion of new ideas from thinkers like Illich and Schumacher into new norms of behaviour for most people. In that respect established institutions in society correspond to what business consultants used to call the “soggy middle layer” – conservative middle managements obstructing communication between forward-looking leaders who recognise the need for change and bright younger people eager to bring it in.
The money system has a particular significance. The way it works rewards some activities and penalises others - at personal, local, national and global levels, in every sector of economy and society. In a monetised world this is the principal way of allocating resources. Money is the scoring system for the game of economic life, alongside the rules provided by laws and other legal instruments. The nature of any game and how it is played reflects what the scoring system rewards and penalises.
The reconstruction of today’s money system is now urgent. More and more people are experiencing it as perverse - in terms of economic efficiency, social justice, environmental sustainability, and physical and spiritual health. They see it as responsible:
- for the systematic transfer of wealth from poor people and countries to rich ones,
- for the money-must-grow imperative that compels people to make money in socially and environmentally damaging ways,
- for the diversion of economic effort and enterprise towards making money out of money, and away from providing useful goods and services,
- for its systematic bias in favour of the people, organisations and nations who should be managing it on behalf of us all, and
- for eroding the credibility of political democracy after 200 years of progress.
All this fuels opposition to globalisation in its present form.
One constructive response has been the spread of “alternative” and “complementary” monetary and financial innovations. These unofficial initiatives will become more important, as people and businesses look for new ways of using their money. But today I shall concentrate on mainstream money -
- the existing ways in which states handle it on behalf of their peoples,
- the perverse outcomes of those, and
- the changes that are needed.
Some Background Points and Principles
1) The 20th century showed that a centralised socialist economy cannot work efficiently, justly or ecologically. On the other hand, the idea of a free market economy based on objective prices is a fantasy. In developed countries today taxation takes a third of the total value of the economy (GDP) out of some activities, and public spending puts it back into others. The taxes add to the cost of what is taxed and the public spending reduces the cost of what it supports. This affects relative prices all through the economy. So the price structure of any economy is bound to be skewed in favour of some things and against others. The proverbial ‘level playing field’ is a mirage.
2) So the framework provided by the state institutions that deal with money must be designed to encourage ways of using money that serve, not damage, the interests of citizens now and in the future. Within such a framework:
a) the market economy, freely responding to money values, would tend to deliver outcomes which combine economic efficiency with social justice and environmental care;
b) the government would be able to let the market economy operate more freely, with less intervention, than most economies today; and
c) citizens, who wished to do so, would find it easier than now to reduce their need for goods and services bought from the market economy, and also therefore to reduce the amount of money they need to earn by working as employees.
3) The state’s new role towards the market and the citizen should thus be to decolonise and empower. Whether to call this a basically capitalist or basically socialist approach is a matter of personal choice. It will aim to integrate economic efficiency with economic justice. So you could call it both capitalist and socialist or neither, whichever you prefer.
4) Milton Friedman’s teaching that “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” (TANSTAAFL) is false. Starting with the enclosure of the common land, modern economies have given massive free lunches to powerful individuals, organisations - and also nations. I shall say more about this and list some of today’s common resources shortly. Their value should be shared as a source of public revenue, in place of the economically, socially and environmentally damaging taxes we have now.
5) This will involve a shift from the idea of redistribution to the idea of predistribution. Whereas redistributive taxes aim to correct the outcomes of economic activity, predistributive taxes and charges will share the value of essential inputs to economic activity. Whereas redistribution is dependency-reinforcing, predistribution will be empowering. It will correct an underlying cause of economic injustice, inequality, exclusion and poverty.
6) In a globalised world economy, we need to evolve institutions of governance embodying those five principles at supranational and subnational levels, as well as national level.
What changes do these background points and principles imply - first nationally, and then internationally?
3. PRACTICAL CONSEQUENCES – for the Financial and Monetary Functions of the State
The essential financial and monetary functions of the state are:
- collecting public revenue;
- organising public spending programmes; and
- ensuring that the money supply (i.e. the supply of official currency - euros, dollars, pounds, etc) is put into circulation, and works fairly and efficiently. How these functions are carried out heavily influences the economic activities and outcomes that characterise a society.
Collecting National Public Revenue
(a) Problems and Perversities of the Present Tax System
Pressures to reduce existing taxes are growing stronger.
- In a competitive global economy, the mobility of capital and highly qualified people will continue to press governments to reduce taxes on incomes, profits and capital.
- In ageing societies, opposition will grow to taxing fewer people of working age on the fruits of their efforts in order to support growing numbers of what economists call "economically inactive" people.
- Internet trading will make it more difficult for governments to collect customs duties, value added tax and other taxes and levies on sales. The internet will also make it easier to shift earnings and profits to low-tax regimes.
- Tax havens were estimated to hold $6 trillion worldwide as long ago as 1998, resulting in massive tax losses to national governments, criminal money laundering and economic distortion. The way to deal with this will probably be to shift taxation away from things like incomes, profits, capital, and value added that can migrate to tax havens and on to things like land which cannot migrate.
These growing pressures on the existing tax base reinforce the economic, social and environmental arguments for taxing “bads”, not “goods”.
Existing tax structures all round the world are, in fact, absurdly perverse.
- They fall heavily on employment and rewards for work and enterprise, and lightly on the use of common resources. So they encourage all-round inefficiency of resource use - over-use of natural resources (including energy and the environment's capacity to absorb pollution), and under-employment and under-development of human resources.
- Today’s taxes are also unfair and illogical. They penalise value added - the positive contributions people make to society. They fail to penalise value subtracted; they don’t make people and businesses pay for the value of the common resources they use or monopolise, thereby preventing other people from using them.
- The present tax system makes it easy for rich people and businesses to escape, or at least minimise, their tax obligations, because they can afford to use tax havens, family trusts, and a range of other devices set up by expensive bankers, lawyers and accountants.
(b) Sharing the Value of Common Resources
A new approach is clearly needed, based on collecting the value of common resources as public revenue for the benefit of all citizens.
Common resources are resources whose value is due to Nature and to the activities and demands of society as a whole, and not to the efforts or skill of individual people or organisations. Land is an obvious example. The value of a particular land-site, excluding the value of what has been built on it, is almost wholly determined by the activities and plans of society around it. For example, when the route of the London Underground Jubilee line was published, properties along the route jumped in value. Access to them was going to be much improved. So, as a result of a public policy decision, the owners of the properties received a £13bn windfall financial gain. They had done nothing for it; they had paid nothing for it; they had been given a very large free lunch. In 1994, based on 1990 values, I calculated that the absence of a site-value tax on land was costing UK taxpayers £50bn to £90bn a year in lost public revenue.
By contrast, the auction three years ago of twenty-year licences to use the radio spectrum for the third generation of mobile phones raised £22.5bn for the UK government. The governments of Germany, France and Italy also raised very significant sums from that common resource.
Important common resources include:
- land (its site value)
- energy (its unextracted value)
- the environment’s capacity to absorb pollution and waste
- the use of limited space (e.g for road traffic, airport landing slots)
- water - for extraction and use, and for waterborne traffic
- the electro-magnetic (including radio) spectrum
- the value created by issuing new money - on which I shall say more.
The annual value of these is very great. Collecting it as public revenue would remove the need for many damaging existing taxes.
(c) Creating New Money
Those who create and put money into circulation profit by the value of the money minus the cost of producing it.
In a democratic age one would expect money, created in offical currencies as part of a national or supranational money supply backed by governments, to be created by professionally independent central monetary authorities (like the European Central Bank) and given to governments or international government agencies to spend into circulation on public purposes.
But that is far from what happens now. In the UK, for example, less than 5% of today's national money supply is created debt-free by the Bank of England and the Royal Mint as banknotes and coins. Over 95% is created by commercial banks out of thin air as profit-making loans to their customers. J.K. Galbraith commented, “The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled. Where something so important is involved, a deeper mystery seems only decent.” UK commercial banks make over £20 billion a year in interest from this arrangement, while UK taxpayers benefit from less than £3 billion a year in public revenue from the issue of banknotes and coins.
Estimated additional public revenue of about £45bn a year could be collected in the UK,
- if the commercial banks were prohibited from creating new money,
- and if the Bank of England took on responsibility for creating it,
- and if the Bank of England gave the money debt-free to the government to spend into circulation.
(Corresponding estimates of potential extra public revenue are: Eurozone ?160bn; USA $114bn; Japan Y17trillion.)
This reform would improve the sharing of resources in many ways. To take one example, a debt-free money supply would help to reduce the costs of economic transactions and the levels of public and private debt. These are now at least partly due to the fact that almost all the money we use has been created as interest-bearing debt which has to be repaid.
Some opponents of reform claim that money in current bank accounts isn’t really money, it’s only credit. But official monetary statistics and monetary policy-makers recognise that it constitutes the main part of the money supply. In fact, recognising it as money exactly reflects what happened in the 19th century when paper banknotes, and not just gold coins, were recognised to be money and commercial banks were no longer allowed to create money by issuing them. The Bank of England’’s banknotes may still say "I promise to pay... ". But that is just a historical survival. Everyone knows that banknotes now are not just credit notes. They are cash.
Today electronic money in current bank accounts is money immediately available to be spent, just as banknotes are. The continuing creation of this state-backed money for private-sector profit is a glaring anachronism.
National Public Spending
So much for national public revenue. Reconstruction of public spending is also necessary. The following points are important.
First, $1.5 to $2 trillion a year is estimated to be spent worldwide on perverse subsidies which encourage economically, socially and environmentally damaging activities. These include the subsidies from rich-country governments to their food and agricultural sectors. Combined with tariffs against imported food, these devastate those sectors in poorer countries - and expose the hypocrisy of rich-country support for free trade. This led to the recent breakdown of the world trade talks at Cancun. But there are many other examples of perverse subsidies. Systematic national and international measures are needed to identify them and cut them out.
Second, support for a basic income (or Citizen’s Income) continues to grow, especially in Europe but in other countries too. It would be paid to all citizens as of right, out of public revenue. It would include state pensions and child allowances, it would replace many other existing social benefits, and it would eliminate almost all tax allowances, tax reliefs and tax credits. It would recognise that, in a society of responsible citizens, some of the public revenue arising from the value of common resources should be shared directly among them. Politicians and government officials now pay huge sums in contracts and subsidies to private-sector business and finance to provide public services. Much of that public money could be distributed directly to citizens to spend for themselves in a market economy responsive to their needs – and also to make it easier for them to develop paid or unpaid work of their own, if they wished to reduce their dependence on earnings as employees.
4. THE GLOBAL DIMENSION
The development of international institutions for dealing with world public revenue, public spending, and monetary management should be based similarly on sharing the value of common resources.
In 1995 the Commission on Global Governance recognised the need for global taxation “to service the needs of the global neighbourhood”. It proposed making nations pay for use of global commons, including:
- ocean fishing, sea-bed mining, sea lanes, flight lanes, outer space, and the electro-magnetic spectrum; and for
- activities that pollute and damage the global environment, or cause hazards beyond national boundaries, such as emissions of CO2 and CFCs, oil spills, and dumping wastes at sea.
The Commission also recognised the urgent need for international monetary reform in a globalised world economy.
Since then there has been growing criticism of the present international monetary system based on the 'dollar hegemony' of the United States. Here are two examples from recent reports, one from Asia and one from Ireland.
- "The dollar is a global monetary instrument that the United States, and only the United States, can produce. .... World trade is now a game in which the US produces dollars and the rest of the world produces things that dollars can buy.
- The rest of the world pays a total annual subsidy (or 'tribute'!) to the US of at least $400bn a year for using the dollar as the main global currency. A Pentagon analyst has justified this as payment to the US for keeping world order. Others see it as a means by which the richest country in the world compels poorer ones to pay for its unsustainable consumption of global resources.
A genuine international currency, issued by a world monetary authority, is clearly needed as an alternative to the US dollar (and other 'reserve currencies' like the yen, the euro and the pound). Issuing it would give a source of revenue to the world community, just as national monetary reform would do for national communities. It would also help to prevent national governments manipulating the value of their currencies in order to distort the terms of international trade in their own favour.
Revenue from global taxes and global money creation would then provide stable sources of finance for global expenditures, including international peace-keeping programmes. Some of the revenue could also be distributed to all nations according to population size, reflecting the right of every person in the world to a global “citizen's income" based on fair shares of the value of global resources.
This approach:
- would encourage environmentally sustainable development worldwide;
- it would generate a much needed source of revenue for the United Nations;
- it would provide substantial financial transfers to developing countries by right and without strings, as payments for the rich countries’ disproportionate use of world resources;
- it would help to liberate developing countries from dependence on grants and loans from institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund which the rich countries now dominate;
- it would help to solve the problem of Third World debt;
- it would recognise the shared status of all people as citizens of the world; and
- by helping to reduce the spreading sense of injustice in a globalised world, it would contribute to global security.
5. IN CONCLUSION
Support for all the reforms I have mentioned has been growing. But up to now it has been fragmented. Different people have promoted each on its own merits, and different interests have opposed each because, by itself, it would disadvantage them. These reform proposals now need to be developed as integrated parts of a bigger project, to reconstruct the role of money in world society.
I hope that this suggests the nature and the scale of the challenge for all our institutions. The ancient Greek poet Archilochus said: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”. Our institutionalised society today has too much of the fox. It splits our ways of life and thought into separate specialisms, careers, academic disciplines, professions, and departments of government. Above all, it doesn’t know how to reintegrate politics and economics and science with ethics.
That is why, in these critical breakthrough years, the initial drive for worldwide institutional reconstruction is coming from active citizens and citizen groups. But, if we are to change course successfully to what Schumacher called “the one and only direction of development that would give sense and meaning to our life on Earth”, a bolder and more constructive response must come from leading people in all the established institutions and professions.
APPENDIX I
The Pio Manzu Centre, XXIX Annual Conference, 2003
“The Pio Manzù International Research Centre, a non-governmental organization of the United Nations and UNIDO, has been operating since 1969 as an institute for the in-depth study of the main economic and scientific aspects of the relationship between man and his environment.
The Centre's primary objective is to design and conduct global investigations into specific issues, drawing upon a broad range of expertise which it seeks to make available to those in the public, private and non-profit sectors whose task it is to devise prompt, effective action strategies.
The main aims of the Pio Manzù Centre are thus to act as:
- a promoter of specific research projects, through the implementation of forms of synergistic collaboration between researchers of different cultural and professional backgrounds
- a link between the world of research and the practical socio-political decision makers, providing a forum for a free and frank exchange of views and expertise on both sides.
Founded in 1969 by a group of avant-garde scholars, the Pio Manzù Centre has set up its own network of specialists, a pool of researchers operating in Bologna, London, Darmstadt, Frankfurt, Boston and Moscow.
As a non-profit-making organization, the efforts of the Centre today are mainly targeted at making a major contribution towards the up-to-date, functional study of the interactions between technological and industrial development and its impact on the human and cultural environment.
Over the years, the Centre has designed and conducted studies of major innovative significance in the fields of scientific and technological research.
From this penchant for cultural exchanges and confrontation stems the true mission of the Pio Manzù Centre which, through the constant quest for common interdisciplinary languages across a whole range of spheres of interest, seeks above all to establish the centrality of man, both in terms of his creative and spiritual capabilities and in the setting of a meaningful relationship with nature and the environment.
The Pio Manzù Centre thus offers public and private decision-making centres a complex, well-differentiated framework of collaboration and integration, much appreciated by a highly authoritative international clientele.
Every year, the work of analysis and design conducted by the Centre's own research staff with invaluable contributions from scholars and researchers from numerous academic institutions is presented in the context of the Pio Manzù International Conference.
This prestigious conference, which is held every year in Rimini in October, marks the culmination of the Centre's collaborative research effort and offers an opportunity for joint reflection on the changes taking place in the global context and on the prospects of mankind.”
The theme of the XXIX Annual Conference in October, 2003 was “The economics of the noble path: fraternal rights, the convivial society, fair shares for all”. The conference was dedicated to the “essential figures of Ernst Schumacher and Ivan Illich, amidst many of their present-day heirs”. Its four Workshop sessions were on “Sharing limited resources and a change of course”; “Assets and hardships: proposals for the invention of a fraternal sharing of benefits”; “Water or oil? The assets of living nature are not up for sale”; and “Surviving and being truly human”. The proceedings will be published by the Pio Manzu Centre in due course.
Gold medals were presented to the following, nominated by the Pio Manzu Centre’s International Scientific Committee (President: Mikhail Gorbachev):
Samir Amin, Franco Abruzzo, Zygmunt Bauman, Lester Brown, Ernesto Cardenal, Diego Della Valle, Emma Nicholson, Martha Nussbaum, Corrado Passera, James Robertson, Dominick Salvatore, Enzo Tiezzi, Mario Vargas Llosa, Giancarlo Elia Valori, Derek Walcott, Jean Zeigler, and posthumously the late Sergio Vieira De Mello.
The Pio Manzu Centre’s address is:
Via Budrio 35, I-47826 Verucchio/Rimini, Italy
tel.: (+39) 0541678139 - 0541670220
fax: (+39) 0541670172
e-mail:
info@piomanzu.com
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Internet: http://www.piomanzu.com
APPENDIX II
[Citation]
Gold Medal of the Pio Manzu Centre
Awarded by the International Scientific Committee of the Pio Manzu Centre to James Robertson
After working as an aide to Prime Minister Harold Macmillan on his “Wind of Change” African tour in 1960, and as a director of interbank research, James Robertson came to see that “decolonising” today’s overpowerful institutions must be part of the transition to a democratic, environmentally benign post-modern world.
Taking a clear-cut stance on issues involving moral choice, his books as an independent writer and lecturer – including “The Sane Alternative”, a landmark study for the “new economics” movement – have supported practicable measures to promote economic justice, such as monetary reform and a shift of taxation on to the use of land and other resources. He was a prominent founder of The Other Economic Summit (TOES) and the New Economics Foundation in the mid-1980s.
The Pio Manzu Centre pays homage to this ‘reasonable revolutionary’ and singles him out as an outstanding example of a modern thinker at the service of society.
[signed]
Mikhail Gorbachev, President
Rimini, 19 October 2003
Endnotes
1 Schumacher Circle organisations in the UK include the Schumacher Society, Schumacher Book Service, Schumacher College, Centre for Alternative Technology, Intermediate Technology, Soil Association, New Economics Foundation, Resurgence Magazine, Green Books, and India Development Group. There are also a Schumacher Society and an Intermediate Technology in the USA. Schumacher Briefings Nos 1, 4, 5 and 9 all deal with questions about money and the sharing of resources – Schumacher Society, The Create Centre, B-Bond Warehouse, Smeaton Road, Bristol BS1 6XN, England - www.schumacher.org.uk
The Right to Useful Unemployment, page 8.
I am grateful to Diana Schumacher for confirming that Schumacher used this phrase, and the variant “forward stampede”, in a number of lectures and talks.
It has been pointed out - by Peter Etherden in “The Schumacher Enigma”, Fourth World Review, 1999:93 - that the institutions dealing with money are a conspicuous example of this. Working with John Maynard Keynes and J.K. Galbraith after the second World War, Schumacher was seen as an up-and-coming authority on international finance and currency reform. So why in later life, in Small Is Beautiful and other books, did he say so little about how the present money system ties most people to unreconstructed ways of living and working and thinking?
For fuller background see:
- James Robertson, The New Economics of Sustainable Development: A briefing for policy-makers (written for the European Commission), published 1999 by: Kogan Page, London, Editions Apogee, Paris (as Changer d’Economie: ou la Nouvelle Economie du Developpement Durable ), and
Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, Luxembourg.
- James Robertson,Transforming Economic Life: A Millennial Challenge, Schumacher Briefing No1, Green Books, 1998 - www.greenbooks.co.uk (Publication of the Russian edition was organised by Dr Tanya Roskoshnaya, Land and Public Welfare Foundation, St Petersburg, now with UN Habitat in Nairobi; and publication of the Japanese edition was organised by Dr Takashi Iwami, Japan Renaissance Institute .)
Stafford Beer, Designing Freedom, John Wiley, 1974, p.2.
The following two books provide good background.
- David Korten, When Corporations Rule the World (second edition), Kumarian Press and Berrett-Koehler publishers, 2001. Part IV is on “A Rogue Financial System”.
- Frances Hutchinson, Mary Mellor and Wendy Olsen in The Politics of Money: Towards Sustainability and Economic Democracy, Pluto Press, 2002, provide a constructive response.
These include:
- “complementary”, “parallel” and “community” currencies like LETSystems and time banks;
- the development of “digital” payment systems in support of those and other currencies, using the internet, mobile phones etc;
- local community financial enterprises like community development funds, community banks, credit unions and microcredit banks (eg Grameen Bank); and
- the socially responsible and ethical use of private money, such as fair trading, and ethical and green consumption and investment.
I owe this thought to Joseph Huber, co-author of “Creating New Money” (see Note 20).
In technical terms, functions 1) and 2) comprise the fiscal functions of the state, and function 3) is the monetary function.
The state is also responsible for regulating private financial enterprises. Scandals in recent years (e.g. Enron, Arthur Andersen, WorldCom, Merrill Lynch) have underlined the importance of this task. But it is not a topic that this paper is discussing.
See Tax Justice Network (www.taxjustice.net).
Sources of information on Land Value Taxation include:
- Fred Harrison, Centre for Land Policy Studies, 7 Kings Road, Teddington, TW11 0QB, England.
- Peter Gibb, Henry George Foundation, 58 Haymarket Terrace, Edinburgh EH12 5LA, UK, www.HenryGeorgeFoundation.org
- Alanna Hartzok, Earth Rights Institute, Box 328, Scotland, PA, 17254, USA. www.earthrights.net
- Jeffery Smith, Geonomy Society, www.progress.org/geonomy
Don Riley,Taken for a Ride: Trains, Taxpayers and the Treasury, Centre for Land Policy Studies, 2001(see note 13).
10 James Robertson, Benefits and Taxes: A Radical Strategy, New Economics Foundation, 1994.
In “Manna from Heaven: Radio Rent Windfalls and the Tax Conversion Fund” in Geophilos 03(1), Spring 2003, from Centre for Land Policy Studies (see note 13), Fred Harrison celebrates the thinking of Nobel prize-winning economist William Vickrey as the origin of this auction, and points out that the socialisation of community-created rental values combined with the full privatisation of untaxed earned wages and savings could remove the ceiling artificially imposed on the capitalist economy by deadweight taxes.
A great deal of work has been done in recent years on energy and environmental taxation. Much of it points towards shifting the burden of taxes away from useful enterprise and employment on to the use of energy and the capacity of the environment to absorb pollution. For example, the EU carbon/energy tax proposal of the 1990s would have used revenue from taxes on fossil fuels to reduce taxes on employment. Valuable sources of information include:
- Paul Ekins, Head of Environment Group, Policy Studies Institute, 100 Park Village East,London NW1 3SR. www.psi.org.uk
- Green Budget News: European Newsletter on Environmental Fiscal Reform www.foes-ev.de
- Timothy O’Riordan (ed), Ecotaxation, Earthscan, 1997.
- Durning A. and Bauman Y, Tax Shift, Northwest Environment Watch, Seattle, 1998.
- Hamond, M.J. et al, Tax Waste, Not Work: How Changing What We Tax Can Lead To A Stronger Economy And A Cleaner Environment, Redefining Progress, San Francisco, 1997.
Useful sources include:
- Michael Rowbotham, The Grip of Death: A study of modern money, debt slavery and destructive economics, Jon Carpenter Publishing, Oxfordshire, 1998,
- David Boyle, The Money Changers: currency reform from Aristotle to e-cash, Earthscan, 2002, and
- Bernard Lietaer, The Future of Money, Random House, 2000.
The creators of money can spend this profit into circulation, as medieval monarchs and local rulers spent the “seigniorage” from minting and issuing coins. Or they can give it away, as the Bank of England and the Royal Mint now give the UK government a proportion of the value of new banknotes and new coin. Or they can lend it at interest, as today’s commercial banks lend their customers money they have created for that purpose. Or they can lend it interest-free to finance public investment, as recent UK parliamentary motions have proposed the Bank of England should do.
For this and the following paragraphs see Joseph Huber and James Robertson, "Creating New Money: A monetary reform for the information age", New Economics Foundation, London, 2000 - www.neweconomics.org. (Prof. Dr. Joseph Huber is at the Institut für Soziologie, Martin-Luther-Universität, D - 06099 Halle, Germany.)
A fuller list of the benefits of monetary reform would include the following:
- Existing taxation and government debt could be reduced, or public spending could be increased.
- The value of a common resource - the national money supply - would become a source of public revenue rather than private profit. That would remove an economic injustice.
- Withdrawing this hidden subsidy to the commercial banks would result in a freer market for money, a more competitive banking industry, and a more efficient economy.
- A debt-free money supply would help to reduce the costs of economic transactions and the levels of public and private debt. These are now at least partly due to the fact that almost all the money we use has been created as interest-bearing debt which has to be repaid.
- The economy would become more stable. Banks want to lend more and bank customers want to borrow more at the peaks of the business cycle and less in the troughs. When, as now, the money in circulation depends on how much the banks lend, the results are “pro-cyclical”. Booms and busts are automatically amplified.
- Central banks would be better able to exert “anti-cyclical” monetary control if they themselves created the new money entering the economy. Controlling inflation indirectly, as now, by raising the costs of borrowing from banks, is itself inflationary - as well as damaging to many people and businesses.
Norman Myers, Perverse Subsidies: Tax $s Undercutting Our Economies and Environments Alike, IISD, Winnipeg, Canada, 1998.
Sources of information about basic income include:
- Basic Income European Network (BIEN), Prof. Philippe Van Parijs, Chaire Hoover d'éthique économique et sociale, Université catholique de Louvain, Place Montesquieu 3, B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. e-mail:
bien@basicincome.org
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- South African New Economics Foundation (SANE), Aart Roukens de Lange and Margaret Legum, web: www.sane.org.za, e-mail:
sane@sane.org.za
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- CORI Justice Commission, Fr Sean Healy, Bloomfield Avenue, Dublin 4, Ireland, www.cori.ie/justice
- Citizen's Income Trust, Malcolm Torry, P.O. Box 26586, London SE3 7WY web: www.citizensincome.org, e-mail:
info@citizensincome.org
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A connected point is about spending the revenue from particular sources on specified purposes. The technical term for this is “hypothecation”.
- An example was the EU proposal to spend revenue from fossil fuel energy taxes on reducing employment taxes.
- Road traffic congestion charges are expected to be more acceptable if the revenue is spent on improving public transport.
- An energy tax hits poor people relatively harder than rich people. That regressive effect can be reversed by distributing the revenue as “ecobonuses” to everyone in the area covered by the tax. (For examples see Ecological Tax Reform Even If Germany Has To Go It Alone, German Institute for Economic Research, Economic Bulletin, Vol.37, Gower, Aldershot, 1994; and E.U. von Weizsacker, Earth Politics, Zed Books,1994.) Such ecobonuses could contribute to a Citizen’s Income.
Commission on Global Governance, Our Global Neighbourhood, Oxford University Press, 1995.
Another important contribution is Hazel Henderson, Beyond Globalization: Shaping a Sustainable Global Economy, Kumarian Press (for the New Economics Foundation), 1999.
Henry C K Liu , US Dollar Hegemony Has Got To Go, Asia Times Online Co Ltd, 2002.
Richard Douthwaite, Defense and the Dollar, 2002 and Feasta, Climate and Currency: Proposals for Global Monetary Reform, 2002, prepared for the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development. Details of both from The Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability, 9 Lower Rathmines Road, Dublin 6, Republic of Ireland; e-mail:
feasta@anu.ie
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; web: www.feasta.org
Two further quotations in similar vein are:
- "To build up reserves, poor countries have to borrow dollars from the US at interest rates as high as 18% and lend it back to the US in the form of Treasury Bonds at 3% interest." Romilly Greenhill and Ann Pettifor, The United States as a HIPC (heavily indebted prosperous country) - how the poor are financing the rich, New Economics Foundation, London, 2002; www.neweconomics.org
- “At the root of this new form of imperialism is the exploitation of governments by a single government, that of the United States via the central banks and multilateral control institutions of intergovernmental capital... [This] has turned the older form of imperialism into a super imperialism”. Michael Hudson, Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of World Domination, Pluto Press, 2003, pp23-24.
In a celebrated essay on “The Hedgehog and the Fox” in Russian Thinkers, 1978, the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin discussed Tolstoy as an example of the tension between the monist and pluralist visions of the world.
The British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has found it difficult to achieve his proclaimed aim of “joined-up government”.
E.F. Schumacher, A guide for the perplexed, Jonathan Cape 1977, p. 147.
Much public commentary on Africa is very negative and often is tinged with despair. But much that is really worthwhile is being done on that continent. Here is one example of some very good work. 
The IMF's own review of Ireland's situation sets out the goals to be achieved on Government borrowing by 2015. It states that if the current projections are not achieved then "the savings committed will be delivered, if necessary through fallback options in relation to public sector wages and primary social welfare rates". Social Justice Ireland rejects this approach and continues to point out that alternative approaches are available to Government. Reductions in social welfare rates or in the incomes of 'working poor' households are unjust, unfair and unnecessary.
This article was written by Professor Karl Whelan of UCD and published in Business and Finance November 2011. 
NCB have published a 
An article by financial journalist Michael Lewis in next month’s Vanity Fair argues that Ireland will have no choice but to default on the private debt (i.e. not sovereign debt). Lewis is well known for writing on Greece and Iceland and their financial crises. He argues strongly against the claim that Ireland has no choice but to repay the debts run up by gambling bankers and speculators. 
As Ireland faces major decisions on whether or not to extend the €450bn bank guarantee there is growing questioning of the danger of moral hazard in this process. Moral hazard is the situation in which an individual, or institution or whatever, is insulated from risk while others pay the negative consequences of the risk. In such a situation those insulated from risk have a tendency or an incentive to behave inappropriately. Many argue this is what happened to Ireland’s banks in recent years and are concerned that the same may happen again in the future if much more serious institutional safeguards are not put into place.
Disillusionment with the current welfare regime in Germany is real and growing. Interestingly, the solution being proposed by a growing bloc of Christian Democrats (Angela Merkel's party and major part of the current German Government Coalition) is that Germany should move to a Basic Income system. The group within the Christian Democrats proposing this move are led by Dieter Althaus, former premier of the German state of Thuringia. T
The number of unpaid carers in Ireland is about 350,000 i.e. 8% of all adults. A 
The financial crisis has driven millions of people into poverty and put many more at risk according to 
Ireland is heading for the fourth year in a row in which its Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) Budget will fall as a percentage of Gross National Product. According to the annual report of Irish Aid just published, in 2010 Ireland’s Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) budget as a percentage of Gross National Product fell for the third year in a row.
On June 10, 2010 former Taoiseach Dr. Garret FitzGerald launched “Act Now on 2015”, a campaign led by 61 anti-poverty organisations to call on Government to deliver on its promise to reach the UN target of spending 0.7% of national income on overseas aid by 2015. Social Justice Ireland is a member of this campaign.
László Andor, the European commissioner for employment and social affairs, has raised concerns that the austerity programmes being developed by national governments to address the present crisis will lead to deeper recession rather than recovery in Europe. 
November 25, 2010
Social Justice Ireland is deeply disappointed with some of the recommendations of the OECD’s latest report on Ireland. In particular we are disappointed with a number of recommendations that would seriously damage poor people, especially those who are unemployed. The report contains mixed messages, some of which are at odds with Ireland’s current reality. The research on which some of these recommendations are made is deeply flawed. Some of these recommendations are also at odds with the ESRI report on Tax, Welfare and Employment just published.
The latest figures for GDP (Gross Domestic Product) per capita in EU Member States have been published by Eurostat. They show Ireland's GDP per capita in Purchasing Power Standard (PPS) is 125% of the EU average. Only Luxembourg and the Netherlands arae higher. Denmark and Austria are tied with Ireland. All other EU countries have lower GDP per capita in 2010.Even when measured as a percentage of GNP (Gross National Product) Ireland is still above the the EU average and ranks in the top dozen countries.
The UN Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico, concluded on December 11, 2010. Fr Sean McDonagh, SSC, attended the conference. Below are his final reflections on the agreement reached at Cancun. His previous ten updates can also be accessed below.
Proposals seek to address a major issue but insist the cause of the current crisis must be allowed to continue
Across all social classes, marriage rates have fallen among those aged in their 20s and risen among those aged over 30. This delay in entering marriage is partly due to people delaying forming any kind of partnership and partly due to the rapid increase in cohabitation among younger adults. These are some of the findings in a new study published by the ESRI and conducted by researchers from UCD, the ESRI and the University of Limerick.
The proposals from the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council to Government are simply not credible. In reality they would make a bad situation worse.
The 
A recently published book entitled The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, has produced the evidence that will no longer allow anybody to legitimately claim that income inequality doesn't matter.
Poverty in households with children is rising in nearly all OECD countries. Governments should ensure that family support policies protect the most vulnerable, according to the OECD’s first-ever report on family well-being.
The total population in the Republic of Ireland is 4,581,269 according to the Census 2011 preliminary results. This is an increase of 341,421 on the 2006 census. In percentage terms this shows an increase of 8.1 per cent over the past five years, or an annual average of 1.6 per cent, compared to 2.0 per cent per annum in the period 2002-2006.
Social Justice Ireland believes that the Irish Government’s launch of its plans for the EU Year against Poverty and Social Exclusion is more rhetoric than real commitment. This can be seen in Government’s failure, among other things, to address the large regional differences in the levels of poverty. Government has an anti-poverty strategy, a spatial strategy and a commitment to balanced regional development but all are failing to address regional disparities in poverty. The latest statistics on poverty show that 9.3% of Dublin’s population is in poverty compared to 22.7 in the Midlands region.
The 
The Government has decided to review the national poverty target. This follows strong objections from Social Justice Ireland and many others to the target included in the National Reform Programme (NRP) by the current Government when it submitted the NRP to the European Commission earlier this year.
The economic and financial crisis in Ireland poses a disproportionate threat to vulnerable segments in the country who benefitted little from its economic boom in the first place, the UN Independent Expert on human rights and extreme poverty, Magdalena Sepúlveda has warned.
The increase in the proportion of Ireland’s population at risk of poverty, (from 14.1% to 15.8% in one year) clearly identifies a major challenge for Government as it finalises its Budget for 2012. Budget 2012 must give priority to protecting Ireland’s poorest and most vulnerable people according to
Ireland’s total tax-take is far below the EU average according to statistics published June 28, 2010 by Eurostat, the EU’s statistical agency. This publication shows that across the EU the total tax-take averaged 39.3% of GDP in 2008. For Ireland the comparable figure is 29.3%. This raises two major questions for Ireland:
A Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) could have a major positive impact on people's well-being and that of the planet, according to a new report by CIDDSE the international alliance of Catholic development agences. The report estimates that a FTT at 0.05% on financial transactions would raise €465bn. CIDSE advocates this money be used to tackle climate change issues. Social Justice Ireland has advocated for years for such a tax and proposed the income should be used to tackle poverty and climate change across the world with particular focus on achieving the Millennium Development Goals.
The German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, has included a tax on financial transactions as part of his budget plan covering the period 2012-2015. This is a very welcome development. Social Justice Ireland has constantly argued for the introduction of a tax on financial transactions along the lines of the proposal originally presented by Nobel Economics Prize winner James Tobin and known since then as the Tobin Tax.
