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This book belongs to the BI tradition. It expresses the views that I held in November 1998, before I fully appreciated the revenue-raising capacity of LVT, and before I became aware of the substantial body of literature on basic income; in other words, I reinvented BI. (As a matter of interest, I also reinvented John Stuart Mill's method of taxing away unearned increments in land values, then discovered that Mill had beaten me by about 150 years.)
The book is a very pure example of its genre. It advocates a universal basic income (one without any means test or activity test), which I call the General Rebate or GR. This was to be partly funded by a very pure GST. Although a GST by itself is regressive, the combination of a GST and a basic income is highly progressive, and a GST would help to raise the revenue required by the basic income; consequently, BI proponents tend to be supportive or at least tolerant of a GST. Because of my grave and long-standing concern about compliance costs, I emphasized that the GST needed to be kept as simple as possible.
Later my views became somewhat less pure. My recent submission to the Reference Group on Welfare Reform calls for a GR that is subject to an activity test (albeit a very broad one, involving no disincentives) and to a means test based on the value of land owned by the recipient. This is a first step towards combining the BI and LVT philosophies. A possible further step is to restrict the means test to the value of land under one's principal place of residence, while taxing all other land so as to conserve its tax-exclusive rental value. A broad-based LVT of this sort would eliminate the need for a GST. The final stage of integration of BI and LVT is described in my draft constitution .
Six Months to Full Employment includes, as an appendix, an early version of my paraphrase of the Australian Constitution. An improved version with introduction and annotations is now available in HTML .
The ``disclaimer'' in the book includes a statement to the effect that I am not a member of any political party. The statement is dated 10 November 1998 and was true on that date!
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior permission in writing from the author....Such permission was given on April 7, 1999, when I placed the book in the public domain: the book is no longer subject to copyright, and therefore may be reproduced in any form, in full or in part, without any obligation to me. This permission does not absolve you of obligations to third parties or of obligations under laws other than the law of copyright; in particular, you are not permitted to present my work as your own or vice versa.
Although this book will always remain in the public domain, I am not obliged to keep it permanently on the WWW or to assist its circulation in any way. While I do not intend to produce any further drafts or editions of this book, I do intend to incorporate some of its ideas under a new title.