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russell lester

Orchardist, Grange

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Idea: Global property tax to support environmental reform

The idea I am kicking around is to establish a global agency, perhaps a party to the world court which would assess a tax on each person globally say one one thousandth of there properties value (local market value) times the estimated shares of mean carbon production they are responsible for, which would i grant you be hard to quantify, maybe it could be based on a per capita national average.

The tax could be levied against nations wishing to or having ever used the world court, and could be once a decade or whatever time interval seems good, the revenues would be available for the world courts foundation managers to disperse to address credit challenged projects that are of great environmental value.

Topics: economy environment world government
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Closing Statement from russell lester

Corperations constrained and taxed more here than anywhere else in the world. Which is why they put manufacturing in China. 25% or more of the pollution over Los Angeles comes from China. Problem is that the China is not under the purview of California law,

I have a rare book, it is called international Anarchy and it was written and published in the interval between the end of the first world war and the failure of the united states to ratify and empower the league of nations. The premise is that conflicts wars and struggles over the sea and air can be avoided if the nations agree to a code of law and mutually enforce it. This does not even require the individual nations to give up sovereignty, just the right to launch wars of aggression, and perhaps its time to include pollution of air water land and bio spheres to the list of mutually outlawed actions. Certainly I can see that you cannot fix problems by simply redistributing wealth, or at least not all problems, but what would the harm be in providing an incentive for developing nations to not pursue programs we know now are destructive to everyone? After all the wealth of the rich nations and the rich in those nations was made on the resources of other nations from time to time, plus it was the process of amassing that wealth or more accurately the process' which were used to do so which have caused such wide spread damage.

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    russell lester

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    Nov 8 2012: This is why we might conclude that economics ceased to be a science or an investigation once it presupposed an engineering physics model as its methodological given. It became instead the defining software of a machinal system with no place for life in its money-sequence operations. Like the received dogma of another epoch, its formulations decoupled from reality in a scholastic formalism, its priesthood would not acknowledge the right of any but trained believers to speak on issues designated by the subject, and its iron laws subsumed all that lived as material ready to be made productive by transformation into the system’s service. ... Yet it would be a very great mistake to simply reject economics as a resource of analysis. It provides an articulated lexicon of exact referents, operations and principles of the global market mechanism which it presupposes as the natural order. And its resources are invaluable in coming to understand the system of rule which the global market now implements across the world in its restructuring operations. One has to expose and understand the principles the doctrine assumes in order to examine and unmask their implications for life-organization. One has to follow the assumptions its theoreticians take as given to see the trail of consequences for reality which obedience to this unseen metaphysic unleashes on the world. One has to connect across the logical lattice of the covert value system the defining axioms and co-ordinates it bears to see what it means for the planetary life-web as an integrated whole. One has, in short, to do what the economist avoids as the explosion of his own identity – open up its value structure to examination.- John McMurty

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