THE GOOD


St. Enoch’s, Glasgow


Taxes serve two purposes. The first is obvious, to bring in revenue for public works. The second is something we rarely think about. To encourage or discourage a certain set of decisions. Want to discourage people from smoking? Tax cigaretes. Want to discourage disused and abandoned properties? Tax disuse, and fine businesses and landowners who fail to keep their buildings up to code.


If, for example, a company has a lease on a building it no longer wants to maintain, it is oſten cheaper to leave it to decay than pay financial penalties to get out of the contract with the land owner.


Neither party has any incentive or legal responsibility to make use of the land in question. It sits there, totally unused, because government policy dictates that it is in the best interests of the landowner and the tenant to let the property rot.


Currently the commercial charge 32


July 2015


doesn’t tax the owners of commercial property. It taxes the businesses which seek to lease that property. This is one of the most idiotic policies I’ve ever encountered, and I grew up in Florida, where we take a masochistic kind of pride in the failures of our stupid government. You tax things to discourage them.


The current tax codes actually discourage landowners from bringing in new commercial tenants. They also discourage new enterprises, by taxing them for


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