RWB 78 Alanna Hartzok: The Earth Belongs to Everyone

Reality with Bruce de Torres

78. Alanna Hartzok: The Earth Belongs to Everyone

On Rumble and the usual audio platforms

Alanna Hartzok discusses her book, THE EARTH BELONGS TO EVERYONE (free pdf at www.theiu.org, under Resources, Books), land value taxation, the prosperity it causes, and Henry George, land value’s great 19th Century American exponent. (See the Henry George School of Social Science, www.hgsss.org.)

Alanna is the Administrative Director (and a United Nations NGO Representative) for the International Union for Land Value Taxation (www.theiu.org), where she helps administer land value tax implementation projects on five continents. She posts at www.AlannaHartzok.Substack.com. And she and I participate in TrineDay Publishing’s monthly Valediction Roundtables (www.Valediction.net), which explore JFK’s vision of peace and Henry George’s economics (among other blessings).

Topics discussed:

Alanna found land value taxation after asking big questions, such as what’s the cause of poverty, war, homelessness, and other social problems? “The earth belongs to everyone” is the ancient idea that makes life beautiful (until “might makes right” poisons and cripples us).

Henry George was a 19th Century American who wrote “PROGRESS AND POVERTY: An inquiry into the cause of industrial depressions and of increase of want with increase of wealth … the Remedy.” He spelled out how wealth inequality grows in societies (like ours) that are based on private profiteering in land. In history he found a wisdom that knew that you cannot treat land like a market commodity and have a fair society.

He predicted that if we did not address “the land problem,” the United States would become grossly unequal in terms of its wealth and power and democracy would break down (welcome to today), because democratic institutions must be founded on the democratic human right to our planet’s land and natural resources as a birthright. (Hence the title of Alanna’s book, THE EARTH BELONGS TO EVERYONE.)

His book, PROGRESS AND POVERTY, sold like wildfire. (Only the Bible sold better.) It launched an important movement quickly. He became famous as a speaker (as well known as Mark Twain), not only in the United States but also in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and Ireland.

Resources:

THE EARTH BELONGS TO EVERYONE

Books - TheIU.org

AlannaHartzok.Substack.com

(100) Aradhana Airwaves | Alanna Hartzok | Substack

TheIU.org - The International Union for Land Value Taxation

LAND RIGHTS AND LAND VALUE CAPTURE

Course - TheIU.org

On YouTube:

Class and Race Viewed through a Land Lens

The Henry George School of Social Science

Home - hgsss.org

TrineDay’s Valediction Roundtables:

The Valediction

PROGRESS AND POVERTY

Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy: George, Henry: 9781911405078: Amazon.com: Books

See the amazing reviews for GOD, SCHOOL, 9/11 AND JFK: The Lies That Are Killing Us and The Truth That Sets Us Free at brucedetorres.com.

Subscribe to brucedetorres.substack.com.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to Reality with Bruce De Torres. With me is Alana Hartzok, author of the award-winning book The Earth Belongs to Everyone. With the International Union for Land Value Taxation, and inspired by the economics of Henry George, Alana helps administer land value tax implementation projects on five continents. We're going to dig into both of these things, all of the above. Thank you very much for joining me tonight, Alana.

SPEAKER_02 0:36

Oh, my pleasure, Bruce. Good to be with you.

SPEAKER_00 0:39

And as you know, I want to discuss with you two basic things, and then from your heart, anything you, you know, anything that you share about this or what it leads to, it's the concept of the earth belongs to everyone. And as much of the history and the difference, the different way of being a human that that gave us back when that was the value, automatic, subconscious, or or intentional. The earth belongs to everyone and all that that implies. And then, golly, if we filled the time just with that, I'd be a happy man. But if there's time, who the heck was Henry George and what is so exciting about what he brought forth? Great. Um, the earth belongs to everyone. What the heck does that mean?

SPEAKER_02 1:32

Well, what is belonging? It's connection. It is the uh feeling that I exist and you exist, and here we are. And isn't this warm and nurturing and safe and secure, and a feeling of one's place in the universe on one planet in this amazing universe? The uh uh Aborigine people of New Zealand, the Maori, have a word, tarangawaywe, and it means a place to stand. That's your birthright. You don't have to pay rent for it, you don't have to take out a mortgage, you have a right to be here. If you have a right to exist, since we are totally dependent on the earth for our existence, then it's only sensible common sense or a essential first principle that our affirmation of our living beingness includes an affirmation of the right to the planet itself. In fact, we're like walking, talking bits of Mother Earth. All the different substances that the earth contains, all the minerals, even down to silver and gold, these precious metals, all these many, many minerals and plants, they're all part of us. We evolved out of the dirt, literally. From dust we come to dust we shall return. And what is this phase between dust to dust? It's this amazing journey, this amazing journey in presence on a really beautiful, splendid planet with lots of other beings. So with a fair economy, because this connects with how we structure our economy. With a fair economy, we'd have plenty of time to just walk in awe and wonder and have time to interrelate with each other and to explore this amazing planet. I mean, young people love the idea that they could just take off and travel around the world. My my uh grandson just turned 20 and he's been to a couple of countries, but now he really wants to travel all around the world. And I did too in that age. I traveled to many countries, and uh, all young people want to do that. All people want to do that. They want to see this world we live in. They're curious. So the earth belongs to everyone, is an essential first principle truth. Would anyone say, no, it belongs to your family, but not my family? Nobody would say it doesn't belong to me, it belongs to you.

SPEAKER_00 4:19

Uh and you've you've been handling this and loving these ideas and seeking to understand them and seeking to impart them and explain them and find policies that tangibly bring this into effect. What do you say to these people who are hearing this for the first time? Busy, overworked, stressed out Americans who think they know how the world works, jaded, cynical, you can't fight City Hall. It's dog eat, dog, uh, birth, work, death, taxes, that's it. And what they just heard sounds like communism, airy fairy, California, airy fairy nonsense, get a job, come down to earth, get your head out of the clouds. What do you start to want to teach them so that a part of their brain opens up and they understand? Wait a second, this is how many, many, many, many cultures, this might actually be the most natural way that we ever live before bullies started uh amassing wealth and exploiting others.

SPEAKER_02 5:23

Natural law, you're right, natural. It is natural law. There is such a thing as as a law to understand the law of nature, the law of what supports life. So what when I've uh started with this theme of the earth belongs to everyone, everybody says yes, but that's the first the first spontaneous response. And then they'll go into the butt, which is what you just expressed, but this and this and this and this. I say, stop, just stay with your first response, which was a yes, because it that's a that's an intuitive response, that's a deep knowing response. And we do have the capacity to know something called truth. There is such a thing as capital T truth on this planet. It comes down to some universal basics like the golden rule doing to others, uh, which is worldwide, that's in all ethics and religions. So that's another natural truth. So if we follow the golden rule and we think of our relationship to the earth, well, how would anybody else like it to be? Would you like it to be so that 1% of the people in Maine and Florida own two-thirds of the land? Would you like it to be the consequence that there's gross wealth inequality? Because we don't follow this natural law. We don't honor that we didn't make the earth. Whatever our theistic beliefs are, scientifically, it would be acknowledged that human beings did not create the earth. There was some sort of creative force. So when we did not make the earth, what is our ownership right? What is our ownership right? It's our belongingness, it's just just it's just the interconnection of life that makes the earth belong to everyone, which is a verifiable truth. Everything is connected. That's what the leading edges of quantum physics is showing us. The connectivity of us all. And yet we're in a unique point. We have a unique focus, each of us individually. And that's a treasure as well. Our individuality is a treasure. So if we don't affirm the earth belongs to everyone, we let a few take the earth. We have to pay rent, mortgage, years, lifetime. We become slaves in a way. Our labor is owned by others, not by ourselves. We don't have any direct right to work on the earth to provide our basic needs, which everyone can provide with this brain in these hands, or we wouldn't be here today. It is indigenous.

SPEAKER_00 8:24

How do you uh think about uh and enjoy thinking about the conundrum that it would be nice to wave a magic wand and imagine that human nature could be so share and share alike? And yet we we wake up, we're born into this century or the last many decades, and using America as an example, um, it's competitive capitalism, and so much of what you're describing just sounds like impossible uh utopian fantasy, it would be nice, but how how do we deal with the butts, how do we get from where we are right now to uh more uh truth-based, love-based, reality-based, that we all, if we all have the rights to the earth and its resources, how do we go from where we are now to systems where that's recognized, that's honored, and it it works. How do we make it work?

SPEAKER_02 9:41

Well, we're gonna go into taxation policy, but maybe we connect a few more dots and look at civilizations that were harmonic, that had a good balance, that had a fair society. Like some centuries ago, one of the Chinese dynasties had a fair society. It was, of course, rural, agricultural. And, you know, like the tic-tac-toe, the nine squares, they had it kind of like that. Each person, each family got a square, the same amount of land, and then the middle square was the community property. That's where it maybe a little market would be, or that was where some shared tools and other shared things would be in that community uh square. But the rest had uh fairly uh partitioned the land for each family. Now, in some societies, that's done. Uh, and then when the family or the individual no longer is using that piece of land, it reverts back to the leadership of the community, a chief. And if it's a good chief, the chief then reallocates that land back to someone else in the community, always making sure that everybody had access to land to grow the food they need and to build the shelter. It's like bird economics, Bruce. Here's bird economics. Birds with just a beak and a little bird brain find a place on a tree. So they find or a bush, they find a location. They don't have to pay for that location. It's free. They look around and say, there's a good spot. And then they go out and they fly around and they gather up some twigs and they start building this incredible, adequate shelter called a nest. And they build and they build, and mama and dad bird they build this beautiful nest, and all the twigs are free. And then voila, the eggs, the little birdies hatch, and then mom and dad go out and they pull out the worms or get the bugs and insects, and they feed, they're a family, and it's all free. It's all a gift of nature, free. So if a bird can have affordable housing for everyone, why can't human beings? And it has to come down to uh what John Mohawk, the uh um his name was Mohawk, but he was a Mohawk elder, native elder. He was also an academic at the University of Buffalo, New York. And he said the problem in the Western modern world began not with Columbus, but 500 years ago with the enclosures. So there was a system uh hundreds of years ago, but fairly recent past, where there was a right to the commons, to the forest, to the fields, the right to fish, the right to hunt. And I'm talking about uh that period in Britain when feudalism had not yet become exploitative, when it was a fairly balanced system of rules, regulations, rights, and responsibilities. So there was a commons for the common people. And then actually happened along the time of Magna Carta, the great charter of human rights, was uh the barons wrested power from the king, but there was no rights to the land for the common people. So the barons got more powerful and they could make more money uh raising sheep on their land. And because there was still a war kind of system between baronial lands, they would go into debt fighting their battles, which are all through that time period as well. And then to pay off their debt, they also needed more cash income. So they started pushing the people off the land, 2,000 acts of privatization, private enclosures, uh, up to what Dickens, Charles Dickinson, writing about in his novels, the horrible impoverishment of the people. Uh, where do you go when you're pushed off the land? If they survived, the ones that did went to the towns and tried to figure out how they could do something, make something, uh, to get some cash from the richer people who by then had entered into the cash economy. So that's when money became important. It was a mediator. It enabled land access. You could at least work hard enough and you could buy a little bit of land.

SPEAKER_00 14:20

And just to mention, just to mention something relatable to, I guess, the average literate person, the story of Robin Hood is this band of guys who they they were being limited by these new laws. They couldn't hunt freely in the woods. All of a sudden they were the king's forests, right?

SPEAKER_02 14:38

Right, right, right. Just as a point of reference, just so this is part of this the story of it, Robin Hood and the little John Riding Through the Forest. A lovely little song on his adventures.

SPEAKER_00 14:52

Right, but then but you've taken us past that up into Dickens' time, and you can continue there. I just wanted to pop that in there as oh, that that alludes to what exactly the scenario you just described, the history you described. That's all. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:03

Yeah. Well, it's these the thousands of laws that privatized the land, which basically was where the guns came out. By force, grabbed the land, took it away from the common people, victimized the common people. What did they have to fight with? The same story. The knights and the armor and the weapons were in the hands of the barons, the organized warfare in the hands of the barons. The people had very little to fight with. Uh, they were vulnerable. So the going that that was over several centuries till it was all privatized. Privileged. So the barons got the privilege. Now that's a good word. It means private law. They privatized the land. And it goes back to the former exploitation under the Roman Empire, which went from being a republic, a fairly democratic system, to again this consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of the few, privilege. So our laws, for the most part, are based on the law of privilege. It's a Roman law that the Christians uh were growing following Jesus' teachings of sharing and nonviolence. And they were uh fed to the lions and tortured and persecuted for three centuries, but more and more Christians kept growing. So that Roman Empire shifted from its pagan gods and it Christianized. But the problem was how to get these pacifist Christians to fight the Roman wars for domination of land, dominium, it's called. It's a legalization of land acquired by conquest and plunder. Might makes right. So the original Judeo-Christian land ethic is the koina, the earth is God's gift, gift to the creator for the atarchia, the sharing, the self-like sufficient livelihood of all. That's Judeo-Christian economics. And uh it was uh put forth in some practical ways, way back. Leviticus, Moses, how to settle a promised land that's fairly shared by all people, debt cancellations, and land rights. And that's what you see throughout thousands of years. If you don't allow debt to grow and you have fair share rights to the earth, you have a harmonic fair society. You do not have prisons. You name me one indigenous tribe that you know of that had a prison system, Bruce. Do you know of any?

SPEAKER_00 17:36

No.

SPEAKER_02 17:38

How about that?

SPEAKER_00 17:39

Right. And contrasting might makes right, which is just the law of the jungle and the schoolyard. I can take your lunch money just because I'm bigger than you. Contrasting that with, I think, the miracle of the American founding, whereby rights make might, and the just laws are those that are uh have the consent of the government, that seems to have opened up such a fertile ground for the thinking of a man like Henry George. Can we uh jump into him and how he took this conundrum of the great wealth causing great uh poverty and talk to me and teach me all about that, or teach the audience? Because I've known you for years and I'm I'm more versed than the average person about it, but I want uh you to share all that, please.

SPEAKER_02 18:35

Well, you mentioned the founding of the country and the high ideals and uh the human rights put forth. Of course, it was limited voting, white male property owners, so step by step we had to franchise everybody. But think, hold the image of the liberty bell in in your mind's eye for a moment. And what do you notice? Has a big crack in it. By the third time it rang, it cracked. So we didn't know how to build a perfect metal bell that would not crack, did we? And we didn't know how to build a democracy that wouldn't fall apart and become an oligarchy, a rule by the rich. But also on the liberty bell is inscribed a quote from Leviticus proclaim liberty throughout all the land and unto all the inhabitants thereof on the liberty bell. That Leviticus quote is the debt cancellation and the land rights from the biblical chapter of Leviticus. We didn't follow that, we didn't know how to proclaim the justice because our constitution and a bill of rights did not give us the fundamentals of economic justice. So we had a political economy without the economic justice. We brought over the land system from Europe that had exploited our ancestors, many of us, and uh caused so much havoc. And so debtors' prisons and the entire uh country of uh Australia settled by impoverished people. I was in Australia once and I went out to one of the buildings that still exists, and the little uh plaque talked about a woman whose children were starving and she stole a loaf of bread. You've heard these stories. She stole a loaf of bread and she got put in jail, and so she got shipped off to Australia. Australia was a penal colony, a debtor's prison. That's how it was founded. So we've become something similar with how exploited most of us in the United States have come to be in terms of the incapacity to easily procure livelihoods that support families. I mean, even when I was a child, many of us only one parent's income. My parents didn't go to college. My father just ran a small business, successful small business. He cared about people that worked for him. He knew their families, the strength of small business and entrepreneurship and working, really good, good, legitimate work.

SPEAKER_00 21:08

So and we had we had many decades where the the pioneers, away from the the cities and the towns with the money changers and the banks and the usurious uh lending, uh you know, pushed the indigenous people with the help of the government, slaughtering them, tragically so. But there were there were these waves of individuals who were able to carve out a living on a farm, establish small businesses as artisans and craftsmen, et cetera, trading. Uh, but then with more and more government and more and more banks and lending, everything's been so financialized now. We're up to our necks with financial challenges and hardship, the poverty rates, uh, you know, the the how hard it is to make a living, paycheck to paycheck, etc. But along the way, in the middle of the Century, what Henry George uh realized, articulated, and where his uh policies, programs, and ideals were implemented is a hidden history that you and the International Union for Land Value uh taxation, uh it's it needs to be shouted from the rooftops. Do you want to jump into that?

SPEAKER_02 22:25

I would appreciate it, yeah, because Well Henry George, we talk a little bit and then talk about his insights. He was born in Philadelphia, a modest uh family, working family, and uh shipped off to India as a cabin boy at like age 15. Uh he saw extreme wealth and extreme poverty in India. Uh, previous to that, he'd seen poverty and wealth contrasted in Philadelphia. This is about 1839, he was born. So we're talking maybe 1850s, moving into. And then he jumped ship in uh California. It was a gold brush. He thought maybe he'd make some make a fortune in gold, but that didn't pan out too well. Uh, and he did find himself with a family who was hungry and he was out of work. He couldn't find work. He he had seen uh San Francisco grow from a small village with uh pretty even wealth distribution, and then very rapidly he saw the same thing occurring: some getting super rich and others struggling to survive. He was so desperate at one point because the doctor said your wife and your children they need food. They're sick because they're not well fed. He took a gun and he went out to the street and he said to himself, I was gonna ask some rich people for money, and if I didn't get it, I was gonna rob. Right? He was that desperate. But through that, he kept searching and searching for what's causing this split between rich and poor. And uh it took a few years. He started to see the land problem. He started to see that the railroads and corporations uh had grabbed up and been allocated uh a lot of land and they were able to make more money. He saw that that people were coming to the area and they were taking more land than they really needed because they knew that as more people came, the population grew, the land values would grow and they would become richer. So this was land speculation and land hoarding. And so those who who don't have free land, what are they to do? They have to pay those who hold and grab those land titles. So they have to pay for that land. If they can't easily pay out of their own worker wages, uh, which is often the case and extremely so today, you have to borrow. So those who get there first grab the land and they have a surplus income unearned just by grabbing land. So they take their unearned income, which keeps growing, and they then can establish the banks. And so then you go to the banks to get the money to buy the land, but then the banksters are making interest. So these are two points of violence: the land grab and then the banking money problem. So most of us who've looked at the money problem, and Henry George did in his later writings, he saw it should be treated like a public infrastructure, no profit, no loss. It's just to facilitate trade. It shouldn't be a mechanism of profit, which is usury. And that's been condemned throughout time. The uh the the interest uh charge to labor and fundamentally for access for land. So what he saw flash like Moses on a mountain, he was horseback riding in the Oakland Hills, not too far from where you live now, Bruce. And he asked uh someone, he said, Over there, how much is that land selling for? And they told him, and he was really shocked. It was way more, because that was the boondocks at the time. Uh, it was way more than he would have expected. But all the pieces of the problem fell together at that point, and he saw, ah, that's a problem. Land hoarding, land speculation increases the land value, makes it more and more difficult for others to be able to have access to Mother Earth, to the basics of all created wealth, which is the land and resource base. So once he saw that, he started seeing how you can connect this ethic, the problem, and the solution to taxation and public finance. And you can look again at who should own the earth. Well, who should own the vegetables in my garden, Bruce? You, my neighbor who's sitting smoking his pipe while I'm working in my garden. Those vegetables in my garden are mine because I work for them. So that is my individual right of property ownership. But if I have a half an acre of land and somebody has a thousand, it's not equal. So he came to see that if you have more land or a better location, you have more value in your land. And that value is created by population growth, is created by what the community provides, like schools and libraries and a number of amenities and public services that we all need to use in common to have a good society. So the land value is a commons, it's socially created, it should be recycled back to society. So the elegant solution, understanding that the commons is the land value that accrues to Mother Earth, and the private property is what an individual or family or business works for through their labor and productive capital. The distinction between the commons ownership and the individual ownership through correct taxation, which is don't tax people on the good things they do, on their labor, on production, on fixing up their homes, on building homes, on wages, on wages, all that's work, mental and physical, that's a contribution to society and to survival. Don't tax it, don't tax the improvements that are made by people, the contributions of individuals. Instead, there's this wonderful pool, a commons fund, which now looks like about one-third of all wealth produced is actually the amount accruing to the land and resources. I like calling it the commons rent, the rent from the commons, that we should all, as fair share owners, if you will, of the land and resources, um we're all get a dividend from the benefit of the rent that accrues, the value of the land and resources. Would you so that goes back to society?

SPEAKER_00 29:05

Yes. Would you share now, as part of this teaching, from Henry George's time and his ahas, his revelations and his teachings, how different communities still turn things around and the great results that that happened from the uh taxing differently according to his understandings of what you've just taught.

SPEAKER_02 29:29

Let me uh tell you one from a while back, a hundred years ago, and then fast forward to recent ones. And one's going to be a rural and one's going to be a city. So, what happened in California as his ideas became well known with the publishing of his progress in poverty, he became very well known and it became a significant movement. So there was a school teacher who got himself elected to the California state legislature who understood this tax policy. And there was one man, Henry Miller, who owned a million acres of land along the Kern River, a ranch land. And uh others wanted access for smaller farms. So uh they needed irrigation. So he did something really, he passed legislation in California that allowed uh local irrigation districts to form, and they could issue bonds to raise money to pay for the irrigation infrastructure, which was to be paid off by the increase in land value caused by the irrigation, massively more valuable land because now it has a financed infrastructure. This resulted in 7,000 smaller parcels and farms and a real renaissance of small communities thriving, and they started using the land value capture tax to then pay for a lot of other public goods. Now, you don't hear about that. What happened was, and here's how the money system fits in the first lien on the land, if you weren't paying your land value tax to the community, which as I said, it paid off the bonds that were issued, and then it enabled schools and libraries and other public facilities to be paid for out of the public purse. Well, the first lien, if you didn't pay for that, your land reverted to the community. Just like an indigenous, you know, if your family's no longer using something, the land reverts and then given back out. But the second lien on the land went to the banks. And at the time, Bank of America and these big banks were emerging. They didn't like that. They wanted to be able to take your land, not allow it to revert to the community. Okay. They took this to the Supreme Court and they won after three trials. What they won was they won that they would have the first lien on the land and it destroyed this beautiful, really correct public finance policy that created the land reform.

SPEAKER_00 31:54

What year, more or less, was that ruling?

SPEAKER_02 31:58

Late 1800s, early 1900s.

SPEAKER_00 32:01

Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 32:02

Yeah. So um now we have uh our tax dollars go to fund like agribusiness, which can be combined oil companies and agribusiness. Uh we subsidize irrigation for their benefit. And they do tax loss farming. They might make a loss in one area of their conglomerate and they write it off against a profit in the other. And that's how one of the games that you don't play where you don't end up paying any taxes, even if you're a big corporation. So that was called tax loss farming. They could lose money on their agriculture, but they're gaining it on their oil. But overall, but we finance their irrigation in those big corporate lands in many cases. So, so this is why people really need to wake up and see that it's true. Taxation is the ability to create or destroy. And we vote not very often, and then we're disappointed about who we vote in, but we're paying our taxes every day, one way or the other.

SPEAKER_00 33:02

But I but I want to stay focused on this for a second because you just brought it to something that so many people today are very, very well aware of, which is how giant corporations have Congress essentially in their pocket because of the donations, etc. So that's familiar, that concept is very, very familiar to people right here, right now. How do uh how do we better understand that in order to do and say things that could untie that knot?

SPEAKER_02 33:28

Yeah, yeah. Now you work to encourage empowerment of small businesses, correct? That's your day job.

SPEAKER_01 33:38

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 33:38

So where's the dividing line between a good small business and a bad corporation? Where's the line? Where's the number? You see the problem, right?

SPEAKER_00 33:47

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 33:48

How come corporations bad just because they're big? So let's for a moment say it's not big or small, it's it's earned versus unearned income. And you look at corporate wealth, a lot of it is unearned from some sort of land or resource control. Why did Bill Gates buy more agricultural land now than anybody else? Kind of a speculation. He might have made money on one hand, but you invest in real estate, don't you? You keep enclosing it with your money. So now the city of Pittsburgh had some pretty good experience within the property tax where they took the taxes off of that houses and put it on the land value. We call it the split rate tax. You take it's like understand the property tax is property that's built, that's created, and property and land. There's two very different taxes within that property tax. When California went Prop 13, those of us, and I was just beginning to be knowledgeable about this in the in the uh 1970s when I moved out, 1978, 79, those of us with the Henry George School knew it was going to be a catastrophe for California because they froze the property tax and then they froze in wealth inequality. All right, because take it back to Pittsburgh. There's there's this corporation, same corporation, that had a good industry with jobs and products they were creating on one bit of land, and on another bit of land was along the riverfront, and they weren't doing anything with that land but speculating on it. Now you shift to the land value tax, that speculative property that's poorly utilized, they're just waiting, they're not having to put it to use to build houses or anything, that's gonna pay a lot more than that corporate land where there is something that's an industry that's producing goods and people are employed. So, what we want to do is squeeze out that unearned income from land and resource control and speculation and profiteering and reward legitimate labor production of goods. So it's not this approach is not anti-capitalism. Capital is a very that now we're to another corruption. This has to do with Henry George's movement that built so strong about the fundamentals of economics and then how it was corrupted when they made the earth, the land factor, simply a subset of capital. But I can give you another example. I know I'm going to give you another example.

SPEAKER_00 36:26

Before you go to another example, I was wondering if you could explain the one you just did in another way so that it's a little clearer for me.

SPEAKER_02 36:36

So you I'll give another example. In Appalachia, which is Appalachia has been considered our internal third world country, right? Poverty in Appalachia, West Virginia, all that area. Um, there are companies that uh would uh utilize the capital, bring together labor and capital, and mine that coal. But they were paying for access to companies that simply had land titles. What you have a capitalism, but on one hand it's it's working labor and capital, and on the other hand, it's just controlling land and resources with a piece of paper that uh came from a kind of theft, anyhow. So that's what we're talking about. That that rent that the company that simply owned the paper title to the resources of Appalachia, uh, that rent should have gone to the states and to the people. That should have funded the people's commons needs, and the people shouldn't have been taxed at all on their labor and production.

SPEAKER_00 37:44

So the owner, the the owner of the land should be should be taxed for the value of the land and eliminate the other kind of taxes, and that would that revolutionizes take home pay, it revolutionizes the pool that a local that uh any the civic organization, whether it's a town or a county or a village or a city, they're receiving much more taxes, right?

SPEAKER_02 38:15

Absolutely, and it it's because that amount is fairly belongs to the people. And as there is more population growth and more industry and more of things we need, the land value goes up higher. So, but there this eliminates the hoarding and the speculation and the profiteering. So you have you know supply-demand and economics. What you you can't increase the supply for land, obviously, but demand is going to increase. But supply-demand, you want to have effective demand. That means you want to have people have enough money to buy what they need. So when you take taxes off of wages, it increases their purchasing capacity. Yes, and when you put the tax, yeah. When you put the tax on the land, it it keeps the land value affordable, keeps the land affordable. There's no bubble, no land price inflation, no making or killing in real estate. Land becomes again a commons.

SPEAKER_00 39:15

Okay, what I was gonna say now you I want to ask about that, but I just want to remember to mention this, and then you can pick what you want to uh talk into. In a city that is taxing the land value, a la you're describing, a la Henry George's alignment or priorities. As uh more money's coming into the coffers of the city, they can do and they can do improvements, the quality of life things, the public amenities, the best schools, the best fire departments, the best libraries, the best roads, which theoretically then attracts more and more uh businesses that you know, more and more people, which attracts more and more businesses, which increases the value of the land, which increases the revenue into the to the commons or to the town or the city, and it's a per it's a self-perpetuating prosperity that I got.

SPEAKER_02 40:10

And I if I understand that correctly, yeah, it's a virtuous cycle instead of a vicious cycle.

SPEAKER_00 40:16

Uh nice. Now, you just said uh the next point that you made that I wanted to clarify or ask questions about, and I forget I can't articulate it, it's already out of my head.

SPEAKER_02 40:26

Well, you wanted another example, and I was gonna give it uh because there have been a number of cities in Pennsylvania. Now, that there are uh some areas like this city-state of Singapore, the land is leased to the Singapore. So they model some of this, and that's a I haven't been there, but I've seen a lot of people touring around in videos. It's a pretty healthy city, it's got a lot of population, but it's got beautiful parks and amenities, and it seems to be very safe and very, very interesting because they're not taxing the people so much, and they are having the land as a lease fee system. It's really the same as a land value tax, it's just that it's acknowledged like the city owns the land, and then and then to get access, you pay a lease fee. Well, that kind of lease fee is the same as what we mean by land value tax. And addressing homelessness issues, a lot of cities have vacant land that's underutilized. They actually have it in their control. They should simply be leasing that out and not charging people on their whatever they want to build there, their buildings or businesses. They can have a free enterprise zone that captures the land value as a city can do it now. You don't need additional legislation for a city to do that, which could really directly address the homeless problem. Uh it's really a land access problem when you see homelessness. So uh going into one of the could you could you flush that out?

SPEAKER_00 42:00

How does this model alleviate homelessness?

SPEAKER_02 42:06

It can help. It can help. Um, it's not a whole the whole systemic shift that we want, but it's something that most places can do now because there's the urgency of homelessness, the suffering of homelessness. So let's address the urgency while we do the systemic reform. I'm simply saying that there are beautiful eco-village models now, out in Oregon, for instance, square one villages, that they're able to have tiny houses and gardens for homeless people because they have essentially a kind of community land trust. And I'm saying cities could do that now with the land that they hold that they're not well utilizing. That can be a fix for some people who are in distressed situations. But now the bigger picture, a small experiment in this, but very powerful, was uh the state capital of Pennsylvania, Harrisburg, uh city of about 50,000. Um in the uh late, see late 70s and before that, throughout the it was the second most distressed city in the United States. Only East St. Louis was worse by federal criteria than Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. So they were desperate. The town council, the mayor, they were desperate to find some way to pull Harrisburg out of this spinning down cycle. Uh they heard about the tax shift off of buildings and onto the land value. They said, let's give it a try. So they started gradually shifting the tax. Now there were 4,000 boarded up buildings. Boarded up buildings when you have homeless people, land speculation, land hoarding. So you don't want the boarded up buildings. So you shift the tax off of the off of building. More people are going to start building if they're not being. Tax against a set of right, but you shift it onto land value. So all those sitting on those valuable land sites, but with boarded up buildings, that's what puts a fire under them. They better become good working capitalists and fix up those buildings or sell it to somebody who can. Otherwise, they have a liability. They can't keep profiting and hoarding and speculating. The incentive's not there any longer. So anywhere we have our cities have homelessness and boarded up buildings. That's the problem.

SPEAKER_00 44:34

So how did Harrisburg turn around?

SPEAKER_02 44:37

Gradually, over a few years, they shifted more and more of the property tax off of the housing and the buildings onto the land value. The 4,000 buildings, 4,000 boarded up buildings, soon they were under 400. It's a pretty short time period. Increased jobs. There had been high arson because vacant buildings invite setting fires. Arson rates significantly went down. The crime rate significantly went down. And I remember reading newspaper articles, they say we don't know how Mayor Reed is doing it, but these things are turning around and getting better. And we even have money for parks and other kinds of good things. So this was just a little shift within the property tax. And Harrisburg started winning awards as a well-functioning city. It turned it around. This was just a little bit of this. This is not the whole thing.

SPEAKER_00 45:29

No, no, it's not. But can I just ask, is it is it true that these are just some examples of many in the last 150 years, just here in the United States?

SPEAKER_02 45:42

Well, I wish I could say there were many. There are a number of efforts to get more in place. Now we had about 18 towns and cities in Pennsylvania because in Pennsylvania we had a like a little Johnny Appleseed professor going around to city councils and saying, try this, try this. And we also over the years got legislation so that the cities could do it. And then the towns and the boroughs, you you, if we go according to the laws that are set up for city charters, some states need to change their state constitution to enable allow this. Well, that can be done, but it has to have a lot of public support. But states that already allow cities to have this choice, it's much easier. It still needs public support. But our third largest city, Allentown, the people themselves were educated and they voted for this. They voted to freeze all other taxes and only shift to a land value.

SPEAKER_00 46:39

When did they do this shift?

SPEAKER_02 46:41

Uh, about 25 years ago.

SPEAKER_00 46:43

How are they doing since?

SPEAKER_02 46:44

At the time, compared to uh the nearby city of Bethlehem, they were doing better with less federal funding than Bethlehem was getting. I mean, they have better affordability, housing, and so on. Housing affordability.

SPEAKER_00 46:58

I want and I and I just want to describe this and get your thoughts on it. It's easy to understand with the banking and the corporate lock on so much of society and government in America for the last 150 years, why there aren't many examples and why this is a hidden history and a hidden knowledge. But also tell us about the group or the the best the best groups that have passionate people teaching this for the last hundred and some years, who who just are just bursting to to get this more well known so it can be tried more and more. Because talk about that. And give us the resources and the websites, etc., for people who have discovered this for the first time in this conversation, Alana. And you're saying it sounds too good to be true. Talk to me about all of that.

SPEAKER_02 47:53

Real quick, you kind of had two questions. I want to honor the first one you had is what happened and why not? And really, there was a corruption of economics I mentioned earlier, and the big money went to the schools of economists that were being formed to really uh influence minds. You won't find many PhD economists have know anything about this. They haven't been taught, they haven't been trained. The field of economics has been obfuscated, like, oh, there's a priesthood. I cannot, you know, really intelligent people with PhDs will tell me, I just don't understand economics because they've been told it's it's an algebraic formulas. So it's been out become out of reach as common sense intentionally. And big money has really big ways of keeping things out of the public eye. So that's the big answer to your questions. People don't know about it. If they heard of Henry George, they were ridiculed, they say, oh, that's last century, that's agricultural economics, we're no longer agriculture based. We're not talking about agriculture, we're talking about what happens to land value as cities grow. So it's been obfuscated. It's the intellectual crime of the last century that this has not been taught, has been obscured. Now, how it's been kept alive, which is how I found out about it, there was a branch of the Henry George School of Social Science that had been formed in New York City. And then there were quite a number of branches throughout the United States, even to Canada, Dominican Republic, other countries, and uh they were giving public-free classes. And in five classes, two hours each, and ten hours, I had my economic enlightenment. It's because actually wealthy people uh had given money to establish these schools because they were concerned to have a fair society. They were industrialists, they were uh successful capitalists, but they wanted a fair society. And they they they saw the Henry George resolution to allowing individual initiative and incentives and entrepreneurial activities, the freedom of the market to prevail without the now concurrent uh wealth inequality and power inequality. So we we bring these two together freedom and fairness. So the Henry George Schools for the education, uh, there's a lot of courses going to be online. You can take courses online, uh, sign up through the Henry George School of Social Science. Uh, the New York uh is still thriving.

SPEAKER_00 50:21

I think I think the website is hgrips.org, maybe.

SPEAKER_02 50:24

I yeah, I think so. Henry George School of Social Science. Uh then we have Common Ground USA. Be careful with that one, dot org, because there's a couple other common grounds. Common ground USA.

SPEAKER_00 50:37

Is there a hyphen in the URL?

SPEAKER_02 50:40

Common ground hyphen USA dot org. You got it good.

SPEAKER_00 50:44

And then there's the international union, and that website is the iu.org.

SPEAKER_02 50:48

Yeah, yeah, that's right. Very good, Bruce. You pass A plus.

SPEAKER_01 50:52

Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 50:53

But no, the let me say another bit about Common Ground USA uh membership, and then there's several chapters. So people can find uh a regional chapter to start working with. Like we have a uh number, we have some people running uh for political office now based on this in some states, and then we have our Baltimore Thrive project to get this tax shift into Baltimore, and there's several projects throughout the country. Uh so it's Common Ground USA and then the International Union for Land Value Taxation goes back to the 1920s. Um they were charted with every two or three years to have an international conference. There'll be several hundred people come together uh working for this policy from okay, from many countries. Now there was to telephone was too expensive. The only thing they had to organize these conferences was mail. Can you imagine? We can't imagine that today. But it kept going all these decades, and then we saw it so easy to communicate with the internet. We don't need to actually have in-person conferences so much. What we need is implementation of the policy. So we began to shift into uh implementation and then uh uh award small grants for uh people who had clear uh project proposals of how they were gonna go about implementing it where they were. So we had had Indonesia, uh Philippines. Right now I'm really excited about uh our wonderful uh guy in Abuja, Nigeria, the capital of Nigeria, has a project, and then a woman who has uh a project in Colombia, the country of Colombia, and then a Nicaraguan person who just graduated from the University of Peace in Costa Rica, and he has a small grants project in Costa Rica, and one of the powerful new technologies for this is land value maps. It's amazing, you know. GIS, you can you can map a town parcel by parcel, and you can locate who owns this and what is its value on the records. Maybe the assessment is not true value, maybe we need to do assessment reform. So you can get a picture and all the data you need to see what Martin Luther King called domestic colonialism. Have you heard that term, Bruce? I was calling it internal colonialism, and that came out, he called it domestic.

SPEAKER_00 53:23

So in Baltimore, you have before you before you go any further, Alana, just watching the time. Yeah, and uh for those excited and intrigued who want to go look into this for themselves, the top one, two, or three resources and websites, and if you don't have the URL perfect, don't worry about it. But the top two or three, that would be common ground hyphenusa.org, right?

SPEAKER_01 53:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 53:55

And viu.org, which is the International Union for Land Value Taxation.

SPEAKER_02 54:01

Land value taxation.

SPEAKER_00 54:02

We have people on all continents.org. The Henry George School of Henry George Social Science, HGSS.org, is where people could slowly and their own time methodically see the history that we've just discussed, and also see maybe some guidance about how to bring this to your city council, how to bring this to your county, how to bring this to your state, how to how to bombard Congress with appeals along these lines, right?

SPEAKER_02 54:33

Yeah, yeah. Step by step, the details. Yeah, we have it all mapped out. We just need more people. We need everybody to get involved.

SPEAKER_00 54:41

So Bruce, thank you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 54:43

Now let me give also my uh email address. I don't mind people email me. Sure. It's my first and last name at gmail.com. And I'll help you, I'll help you plug in.

SPEAKER_00 54:53

Thank you. And I'll have that displayed, etc. And what do you think about this just as an idea or a concept or a metaphor? Just like the American ideals uh thrived for a while, maybe thrived in fits and starts, thrived imperfectly under the Constitution with the chaotic and exploitive capitalism that always uh muddled things up. Now I think has eradicated America as a functioning reality, meaning we our constitutional rights have been buried by the War on Terror, Department of Homeland Security, and uh USA Patriot Act. But it still is a concept, an idea whose time has come long overdue that could still rejuvenate and reinvigorate, is I think it's an it's analogous to Henry George's economics and this whole concept of the land taxation grounded on a like a found a brand new identity of humanity on earth, the earth belongs to everyone. It's a is it the equivalent? Is it the political or is it the economic equivalently empowering thing that the American political ideals are?

SPEAKER_02 56:03

Yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 56:05

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 56:05

I mean, it's a way to heal the crack in the liberty belt. And you know, the other thing, it's based on local centralized government is centralized control. It always happens. So we need straight strengthen our local people, our local communities, our local economies. The property tax is the local tax. We've got to know how to use it correctly.

SPEAKER_01 56:28

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 56:28

And we start it like popcorn, people get onto it. No, no central authority here, just people coming together and seeing this is gonna help us.

SPEAKER_00 56:37

Do you think they yeah? Do you think do you have the impression that going to school board meetings is the easiest and most common civic participation Americans do?

SPEAKER_02 56:51

And if they brought this to school board meetings, well, well, uh people also go to their town council and city meetings, and they go to their district council or their district councilor if it's a big city.

SPEAKER_00 57:06

So wouldn't it be a good thing?

SPEAKER_02 57:07

So there's several ways into this.

SPEAKER_00 57:09

Okay, good. So at one of those websites we mentioned, wouldn't it be great if they were able to just print out a one sheet of talking points that your average American and your average town could go to and say, This is what I want this council to consider. And page two is three examples in the in history or currently where this transformation has been applied. And look at the shift in the revenue and the prosperity. That's got to be easily uh yeah, uh it exists.

SPEAKER_02 57:47

Uh, I mean, Baltimore Thrive's website, land value tax website, has a lot of good articles and they they post what they are using, one or two pages, to go to public officials and state officials and so on.

SPEAKER_00 58:01

Baltimore. That's the project.

SPEAKER_02 58:05

Yeah, that's the project. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 58:07

So see, people can search Baltimore Thrive land value taxation and they'll find a website. We don't know what the URLs right now.

SPEAKER_02 58:16

Well, it just might be Baltimore Thrive.org, but I don't have it memorized. But if you do well, if you do that Baltimore Thrive land value tax, we have two two coordinators now, paid coordinators. I mean, as this builds, people increase their professionality because it needs some expertise to implement. Um, there will be more opportunities for people to do professional work in this field. It's a legitimate field like any other, it's a knowledge field.

SPEAKER_00 58:47

But uh what would you say if our if our teaching for tonight is over and now we're in the green room talking about how this conversation just went? What would you say?

SPEAKER_02 58:59

Oh boy, Bruce. Ah, you know, I never had such a question in my life, and I've had a long life.

SPEAKER_00 59:09

I'm listening.

SPEAKER_02 59:10

Help me here. What would I say in the green room about this conversation? Uh I I'd say uh I think we covered what we intended to cover when we were in the groom green room before we started. What you and I agreed to talk about, I think we did it. Agreed. Okay. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 59:31

How good of a job did we do covering what we covered?

SPEAKER_02 59:34

I don't know. I can't say.

SPEAKER_00 59:46

Now think about it. Think about everything about everything we talked about and how we talked about it. What's your idea?

SPEAKER_02 59:53

Yeah, it's a pretty big picture. And you know what? Uh a lot of people out there, we're looking at geopolitics and it's so horrific, but a lot of people have a very clear analysis and many levels of what's going on. Uh, but there's very few who have solutions. You know, they're great analysts, and then what to do about it? I don't know. So hopefully we presented an analysis of the problem, of what makes the problem, what they are, and a clear solution, a clear way forward based on very deep, universal principles. And frankly, they are perennial wisdom teachings. And you know what? When I was looking back at the history of this idea, I came across a little book on uh the economics of the Vedic period. Now that's Vedic period, that's the Indus River Valley thousands of years ago. That's in western, what now western India? And the Greek scholar who was uh studying the Vedic periods and societies, he said in his book, he said we were surprised they had a land value tax system. We thought that was a modern concept. Go back 5,000 years in this river valley, and this is what I've seen in looking back through long time periods. It is a perennial wisdom. Even the the specific public finance policy goes back very far. And when we lose that, we lose the thread of how you have a fair functional society. It's basic, it's just basically.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:30

Not only is it is it basic and deep to to a new identity and relationship to the planet and reality, which is which is rather esoteric and metaphysic, that's also its strength because that's the deepest foundation that there is. But also, as you shared, this is so tangible. This is transformative in one year if some things got adjusted at the bare, at the basic economic level of a town, of a just a functioning town.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:00

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we don't advocate doing a whole thing real quickly, but gradually as people adjust and see how it works. But but because people know that they're not going to be able to uh make a killing in real estate as the tax shifts on to the land value, they readjust their portfolio, you know, those who have excess money and have portfolios, and they take it out of land and resource profiteering and speculation. So even before it's fully implemented, they're adjusting how their investments are gonna go. And they're gonna go towards investing in things that we need. Like Gandhi said, there's enough for everybody's needs, but not the greed.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:41

Going to take it out of the greed column and put it in the let's what can we make and build without right, and there's going to be very strong and intense pushback, and even violent pushback by the big, huge, disgusting money powers that be that are profiting by the way things are right now. And the only way we the people can uh confront and turn things around and change the situation is by the strength of our numbers, by having an overwhelming amount of us who are willing to take the arrows and experience the backlash. And that's why it takes more of us to find the time to watch a video like this, yeah, read, click into some websites like this, and then force yourself to have conversations about this in order to light up more people about things like this. That is what it has always taken to overcome tyranny. And we are talking about overcoming a very heavy, a very painful, a very awful, evil, exploitive, extractive tyranny for the last many, many decades, if not a couple hundred years.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:54

Right, right. We are the many, they are the few, and they're very clever and cunning. They love to keep us divided and conflicted. And one of the biggest divides is red, blue, Republic, Democrat, Republican Democrat.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:08

And the fire hose of bad news. The fire hose of bad news, hopelessness that makes us feel powerless and and and feel like giving up and feeling like we don't have a chance in hell to do anything to improve to improve our lives or uh or the lives of our children.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:22

Yeah, there's a psychological and spiritual repression uh that that that is at work, that's for sure. So uh as much as we can enliven with a positive way forward, that lifts the vibration, it gives people the hope and the direction and uh strength to come together.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:42

But uh and that's where the reality really happens. It's is that an energetic and vibrational level, amen.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:50

Wow, yes, sir.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:52

Wow, let me now, because everything's blurry until I put my glasses on. Oh, I love what we captured, Alana. Look how long we went.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:00

All right, it seemed like just a cup of tea moment.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:04

Well, that's because that's what it means to us, and um, thank you for yet another wonderful conversation. You and I have known each other for years now.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:13

Yeah, getting there.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:14

As the layperson I am about it, I understand it as well as I do, but it it really reaches me, you know, completely and deeply. And uh it's it couldn't be more exciting, you know.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:25

Uh wonderful to hear. Thank you, Bruce.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:29

Hang on while I kill the recording so we can talk about when this will happen. But thank you very much, Alana. And I want to thank everybody for uh watching and listening. Bye, y'all.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:42

Bye.