Home Summary Table of Contents Read Chapter One Online How to Order About the Author For Speaking Engagements Book Reviewers Only Objections and Answers Donations Your Questions or Comments Humor Protecting the Environment Truly Helping the Poor

How to Protect the Environment We can apply equal rights to the issue of protecting the environment; in fact, the environment won't be fully protected otherwise. Equal rights requires that we tax land values instead of taxing human production; a full discussion of this can be found in Society at the Crossroads. This is the only way to contain urban sprawl into the clean-and-green countryside. This is how it works: when urban land values are taxed, keeping urban land-sites out of full use is discouraged; it becomes expensive to do so, since the higher land value tax will not be offset by a paltry income from an inadequate land use. In addition, the down-taxing of the improvement makes it cheaper to build. Add both of these factors together and there'll be urban infill rather than sprawl into the clean-and-green countryside. In other words, with land value taxation, homeowners and other land users will build in the more convenient city rather than spreading out across rural acres. There'll also be less commuting, road-building, car pollution, heightened utility costs, etc. Not only that, but if rural areas are also land-value-taxed, rural land will be more efficiently used (for all of the above reasons), and so there'll be less rural land sprawl onto previously-undeveloped rural land. However, equal-rights-required land value taxation is likely to be first applied in urban areas only - for political reasons. If we green the city, we'll have to blacktop the countryside. We should not be surprised that if we tax in accord with equal rights, our environment will be protected. Once again, a full discussion of this can be found in Society at the Crossroads. Other Advantages There are four additional ways to protect the environment via the application of equal rights: Promote Public Transportation - Spotty development of city land makes mass public transportation uneconomical. Buses and subways require concentrations of people near stations, and taxing land values more than buildings would bring this about. Zoning Protection - Zoning regulations are often lowered to allow for environmentally harmful land development; this is often called "spot re-zoning." But this would be discouraged by land value taxation, because there'd be no land-speculation profit to be made by extracting an up-zoning. The urban masterplan, which requires zoning, won't be shredded by haphazard land development. Absentee Landownership Would Become Uneconomical - absentee landowners often use land unecologically, but such ownership would become uneconomic with equal-rights-required land value taxation. Reason: there'll be no profit in collecting land rent, only to turn over that rent in taxes at the end of the year to the government. Good Revenue Source for Environmental Programs - A tax on land values could finance environmental-protection programs without inhibiting production; in fact, such taxation would promote production (for the reasons already mentioned). Also, if land is taxed, then land will be cheaper for the government to purchase for parks and playgrounds. A surtax on land values would therefore be ideal for financing parks and playgrounds. How can land values be taxed more in the foreseeable future? Read Society at the Crossroads to find out. Read the first chapter for free!