Hudson’s solution was for Cuba to tax LAND, a variation on the Geoist ideas of Henry George. Ordinary Cubans who own houses and farms would hardly suffer any increased tax burden. Taxes would not be applied to (a) labor nor (b) production, two economy-strangling forms of tax. Landowners would not suffer land asset price inflation and the accompanying private tax of interest and penalties. The incentive to bid up land vanishes by this model, because all land increases go to the state. Still, foreign business investments improving an area would see profits, justly earned and not hampered, which would tend to raise property values in a given area. Property improvements, such as fancy hotels, would not be taxed either, just the value of the land it’s sitting on.

Hudson is not quite a libertarian, his argument is (in my rough estimation) that there are certain “floating” values out there of assets, and banks and investors LOOOVE to bid up those prices but do not like to “waste” their time/effort/capital investing in productive concerns like factories or farms. This seems to hold true, in the US and globally.

I noticed that a barebones 900 sq foot house in San Fran was selling for half-a-million dollars. Nancy Pelosi, capitalist, is heavily invested in SF real estate.

From this viewpoint, the choice of NOT paying a tax does not exist. The choice is whether this tax goes to banks, private speculators, and the global banking cartel. Or does it go into the public sphere to pay for … whatever. In the public sphere, the tax could go to war, or to education, or to police state repression, or to health care, or to whatever the folks can wrangle, depending on the status of real grassroots democratic power. In the private sphere, the tax goes to whatever the private interests demand, be it foreign corporate subsidies like roads from the mine to the port, various forms of loan sharking, demands to impose wage and pension austerity, raiding central banks, taking over indigenous firms, etc.

One key issue I see is that as long as a Cuba or other country would refuse to grant 100% full rights to capital and allow the loan sharks free reign, and if they imposed controls on speculation and capital flight, the global propaganda organs which operate adjunct to the banks will *still* label Cuba a communist dictatorship, regardless how many foreign and in particular US corporations plant themselves on Cuban shores.

This holds true, to my understanding, historically. Arbenz in Guatemala was actually trying to model an economy after the US market model “mixed” economy, while countering old-style Feudalism and the wealthy “family values”, and also countering Washington-backed corporatism, i.e. United Fruit and the CIA. Despite that, Arbenz was *smeared* as a communist and was attacked with an economic embargo/stranglehold and finally attacked by CIA and CIA-backed fascist military leaders.

Countless other examples can be shown of so-called “communists” who were really not quite communist but were in some way focused on shaping or controlling their domestic economy and financial destiny in opposition to control by US-based statists, aka Washington. William Blum mentioned quite a few examples.

Does anyone dispute this? I am well aware of the existence of two or more versions of “history” on any given topic or region or struggle.

The most powerful knowledge that has made ma a fan of C4ss and Kevin Carson and related writers is the nauseating hypocrisy of those “vulgar libertarians” and especially conservatives who *claim* the US system represents “free market” principles and practices. I also especially liked the chapter on Jefferson and the Constitution on Mises.org by the late Albert Jay Nock.

Nock, writing in the early 1900s, showed why the current “back to the Constitution” cries of the Tea Party types is hardly an answer, because the adoption of the Constitution was a sort of economic coup by elite capitalists, speculators, monopolists and the like to assert both political and economic hegemony over the new nation-state [with their notes and minutes kept secret for 50 years], by rejecting the lofty principles of the Declaration of Independence and tossing out the loose Articles of Confederation with relatively more local control.

Additionally, it is way to premature to call this a “victory of the free market” (if this is victory, so was Perestroika, right?), and skirts awfully close to the issue of “liberalization” just being a front for alternative authoritarian policies.

I suspect the markets have the potential for a far more complete egalitarianism than any of the state’s policies can match.