Opinion EXPROPRIATION WITHOUT COMPENSATION Charging of land rent by the state and distributing the income is fairer BL PREMIUM

Could the unlanded do much better for themselves than just occupying expropriated land? Prof Nicholas Tideman of Virginia State University pointed out in a submission to the Davis Tax Committee in June 2017 that: "The most equitable possible conditions under which citizens might gain access to land would be if the government collected the rent of land and shared it equally among all citizens, either through a ‘citizens’ dividend’ or through spending for public services." Tideman states that a general equilibrium analysis in the US of the effect of shifting taxes to land concluded that in the short run, the overall benefit from the combination of higher wages and higher returns to investment would be 15% of net domestic product and, in the long run, a consistently higher growth rate. He also said that SA could expect similar benefits and he estimated that a tax collected from all of the rental value of land in SA would yield R841bn per annum, which was close to the 2017-18 budget for...