Oops -- I posted too soon. McRobert continued: "There is no way any company can be big enough to vertically integrate all of these, and for the paltry saving of a 2% tax."

But it can integrate the big-ticket items, as GE apparently did. And it's not just 2%, because the tax cascades.

"A land value tax is for those who love control."

Eh? A "land value tax" doesn't tell you what to do with the land, as long as you compensate the rest of us for excluding us from that land, in proportion to the value that our productivity bestows on that land.

A "land value tax" doesn't require the government to know about any transactions other than those involving the land itself, and the government already needs that information for the purpose of maintaining land titles.

In contrast, any sort of transaction tax, including a turnover tax, requires Big Brother to know about EVERY taxable transaction. That should be repulsive to anyone who claims to believe in liberty or privacy or small government.

"Land valuations are a joke and so far removed from market valuations as to be just another great pretense."

Well, if you don't trust the valuation system, you can pay the tax in proportion to your own valuation, provided that if the government needs to resume the land, it compensates you according to that same valuation. This system was actually proposed for the newly independent Zimbabwe, but was rejected. And didn't that turn out well for the land owners?!

John McRobert,

Apologies for my anonymity. I'm from around your red-neck of the woods and since I ventilate radical views here I'm wary of lynchings. But I assure you I'm member of no spin-doctor army.
If you cared to read my link you'd see that we are squandering our "low entropy" resources at an alarming rate and that "bound energy" of the sort you allude to is probably forever beyond our capacity to utilise.
My main concern, however, is that "market solutions"--economists' version of "predestination"--is not only destructive and wasteful, but that even the breakthroughs necessarily consume more energy than they create, all the while depleting the dowry of free energy the planet has processed over eons. You're familiar with the second law of thermodynamics so you would know this: on the one hand that we convert "available" resources into unavailing waste (and pollution--also compromising naturally renewing processes) and entropic loss, and on the other that our artificial methods aggressively confound the biosphere's capacity to compensate, to dig it in if you like. The primitive aboriginal culture you despise was "part" of those natural cycles, we are at war with them.

I'm also against the carbon tax! Because it's predicated on the nonsense that market-based solutions and economic growth can reduce emissions. They patently cannot. Economic growth means material growth and "more" emissions! I thus despise the Labor government for its ingenuousness, or disingenuousness, as the case may be.
The holy grail of clean energy is being purchased at vast cost in terms of resource depletion, pollution, mass extinction (another positive feedback) and, most astounding of all, "growing dependency"--born of cultivated demand! Meanwhile the fantasy of "renewables" is a complete furphy, wasteful in the production of and inevitably subject to entropy!
The only way market-based solutions can "prevail", and probably will, is by taking the human race over the cliff in short order, but equipping the survivors with both a technological legacy and the profound benefit of hindsight!

And you think tax reform to free-up the market's the way to go. like I said, just another mad-optimistic neoliberal!