Leon Phat           

• You're only phat and happy when you can take it or leave it.

When you don't need an employer, instead an employer needs you, you don't need minimum wage support, you don't need unions, you don't need charity welfare programs.

However, so long as you need an employer, you'll need some combination of those things.

Show Leon Phat a human being and he'll show you someone who is willing to work for housing, food and family. Now, if all land were equally valuable for human beings, there'd be precious little difference between incomes because anyone who wanted to hire you away from your equally valuable land as theirs would have to induce you to leave it to work for them. They might have a factory, but if you had that garden and a shack, you could tell him to run his factory himself unless he was willing to give you a smart part of that factory's income.

But not all land is equally valuable. Some is worth gobs, in part because of the community-generated value of streets, MUNI, BART, education and general neighborhood ambiance.And don't forget the value area businesses add to location!

As a renter you pay the landowner for those benefits of location (as an owner you pay the bank until you become the bank). That means you're paying a premium to a private party for advantageous land. No wonder he's rich and you're struggling and anxious for a job.

But when you can take it or leave it, your income will rise, and not just a piddly bit.

Leon Phat's going to retrieve that community income known as land value. In doing so he'll equalize the value of land for individuals (by not letting some keep the extra value added by community). In other words people will keep what they earn, but won't keep what they don't earn.

That's when you can take it or leave it, brothers and sisters.

Leon Phat will do this by collecting 50% of the annual potential rent of every parcel in the city. We'll call it a Community Benefit District Land Rent Tax (CBDLRT), but it's really just collecting the rent of community-added value from land owners.

Land values are community

Let's consider the case of the hotels and the hotel workers.

The workers want a fair deal, and that includes, in their minds, higher wages. At first glance the workers and the unions representing them think the story is all about how the hotel owners are greedily squeezing the workers--there are so many of them--to accept low wages.

But why don't all these workers--there must be some among them who know how to run a hotel--band together and open their own hotel? Well, of course they probably haven't been able to set aside any savings to pool together to buy or construct a hotel.

But let's assume they were able to. Now they would be competing with their former hotel employers. Would they succeed? Couldn't they distribute among themselves the excess profits which the hotel owners are now pocketing? Maybe. But hotel owners are each and every competing amongst themselves to turn a profit. Their competition results in a lower return than it would were they to be monopolists.

At this point it seems the problem is either too many workers or hotel owners collectively holding out against the workers. . . which is pretty much the same thing as saying there are too many workers.

Hmmm. Now let's look at this issue from a different perspective. Let's observe that there are in reality three, not two players in the hotel wars. There are the hotel owners, the workers, and THE LAND OWNERS. Often times the hotel owners are also the LAND OWNERS, but the two roles are functionally different. That is, hotel owners own a building and manage a service, while land owners merely own a gift of nature. Land owners as land owners neither make anything nor provide a service, unless you consider collecting a fee from people who want to use the earth a service. 

Leon Phat believes that the function of LAND OWNER as a collector of land rent is absurd. He believes that land rent, privately collected, IS the great villain in this story.

At present, both hotel owners and workers have to pay the land owner merely for the opportunity to use the earth. As hotel owners compete with other hotel owners for better sites for their hotels, and as workers compete with other workers for better locations to work and set up their businesses, they compete, in part , by surrendering their possible income as land rent paid to the land owner.

Leon Phat wants to short circuit this bald-faced legal theft. He advocates implementing a community Benefit District Land Rent Tax (CBDLRT) that retrieves upwards of 50% of land rent for the community.

When land owners make little income from mere land ownership, but themselves have to pay the annual value of land to the community, they'll scramble to find renters (to pay the land rent due) or simply step aside and let the hotel owners and/or workers pay the land rent directly to the community. 

At that point, hotel owners will compete with hotel owners on a much more even basis. That is, they'll compete on the basis of hotel management and maintenance, not under terms where one is paying land rent (because he doesn't own the land beneath his hotel) and the other is relatively free from paying land rent because he owns his own land and doesn't pay land rent.

It is under these circumstances that "greedy profits" will disappear and wages will go up by just that amount!