Rethinking Growth

3 May 2011

Herman Daly interviewed for Seed magazine:

What we tax mostly now is income from the input of labor and capital, what economists called “value added.”

Value added to what? To the resources extracted from nature, which are treated as zero. So, the idea is to shift our tax base away from value added and toward the resources themselves. If we want to increase efficiency, then we have to begin by making things more expensive. We’re careful how we use gold. We’re not so careful how we use aluminum.