Principles
The objectives of the IU are "to stimulate in all countries a public opinion favourable to permanent peace and prosperity for all people, through the progressive removal of the basic economic causes of poverty and war". The IU's work is guided by principles of equal freedom and sharing of common resources of community and nature - ideas most cogently set out in modern times in the writings of 19th century American reformer Henry George. Specifically, towards the realisation of its objectives, the IU "favours the raising of public revenues by public collection of the rental value of land apart from improvements"; and, further, favours "the abolition of taxes, tariffs, or imposts of every sort that interfere with the free production and exchange of wealth". Following from those principles the IU advances a radical land and fiscal reform agenda and 'real' free trade (i.e. that does not privilege Western corporate interests). The principal policies advocated by the IU are the public collection of 'resource rents' and land value taxation, in lieu of traditional taxation.
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Famous quotes containing the word principles:
“Unless democracy is to commit suicide by consenting to its own destruction, it will have to find some formidable answer to those who come to it saying: I demand from you in the name of your principles the rights which I shall deny to you later in the name of my principles.”
—Walter Lippmann (18891974)
“All those who write either explicitly or by insinuation against the dignity, freedom, and immortality of the human soul, may so far forth be justly said to unhinge the principles of morality, and destroy the means of making men reasonably virtuous.”
—George Berkeley (16851753)
“Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)