I believe in Scotland because as a nation we can choose a different fiscal path to that of our traumatised, troubled and domineering neighbour.
Why fiscal you might ask? Because decisions about the distribution of the national income affect not only who receives it, but its size too. It gets to the heart of the twin issues of poverty versus prosperity and unequal life chances versus privilege.
At the moment our fiscal regime in Scotland remains a pretty exact copy of the one devised and rolled out at Westminster; a regime in which wages, trade and enterprise are taxed highly. This serves to reduce these socially and economically desirable activities by about £40 billion a year in Scotland.
Some economists now suggest revenue is not required to fund expenditure by nations. Whilst accepting the possibility of government deficits to serve immediate public needs/emergencies, I subscribe to the view that in the end things must be paid for out of wealth produced by a country's workers and innovators.
However, in the 20th century an unsubtle change in economic science originating in the great East Coast US universities and funded by the great American rent extractors, spread across the globe: Neoclassical Economics (NCE). This is the economics taught universally today and used at Westminster to manage the UK.
NCE differs from Classical Economics as follows: The gross national income is identified as the returns to only two factors of production: labour and capital. Classical economists identify three: labour, capital and land.
The enormity of that subtle difference must be grasped if Scotland, as an independent nation, is to flourish or languish. As an independent nation, Scotland would be free to choose. It is a stark choice that each nation must face and make at its deepest constitutional core. Whether to lump its land and natural resources in with 'capital', leaving the product of society (site values) and nature (natural resource values) the play things of the speculators responsible for worldwide poverty and inequality, who have such an abominable track record of planetary rape. Or to identify the rent of land and resources as Scotland's net income: Annual Ground Rent (AGR).
'Rent' is fully half of GDP. There is plenty of it to provide all the services Scots might choose to be supplied by government. Rent is the national net (taxable) income. Rent belongs to the Community. Rent should replace the taxes on wages and trade which reduce UK prosperity by at least £0.5 trillion a year and Scottish prosperity by about £40 billion a year.
But it is not just the amount of productivity that AGR would facilitate, freeing employers to exist plentifully in every corner of our land (including all peripheral locations where current regressive and arbitrary employment taxes simply cannot be afforded). When half the gross national income is in the public purse where it belongs, that ENTIRE SUM is shared per capita across Scotland.
And that would be something very different than what happens today. Today in Scotland site owners receive free capital gains produced by and transferred from Scotland's workers, at the hands of a corrupt fiscal system channelling wealth to a privileged minority who neither earn it nor provide their nation with anything in return.
Such is the Westminster legacy in Scotland. An independent Scotland could choose to be different. I believe in Scotland.
I end with two simple questions.
1. What fiscal course will we direct our political leaders to take?
2. Will our independent Scotland be worth living in if we continue with wage and trade taxation?
Ian Kirkwood
Director SLRG