Re: BVT, a just tax [1]

>Actually they reflect the same thing. If a company is going to open a
>factory somewhere, thus creating a lot of jobs, the company knows it will
>yield large positive externalities. So the company will try to internalize
>and capture the externalities.

The company has a finite amount of capital, provided by its
shareholders and creditors, to employ. It is likely that those
shareholders and creditors want the company to employ that capital
towards furthering its industrial goals (i.e., building whatever sort
of widget the company builds more profitably and expanding the market
for those widgets). If they wanted to use their financing for land
speculation, they would just do it directly themselves.

>In days of yore, this led to company towns. The company not only owned the
>factory, it also owned the surrounding apartments and sometimes even the
>grocery store.

The development of company towns was driven by far more than an attempt
to capture site value. Namely, the companies could not wait for other
businesses to come in to provide those services and more importantly it
created an army of artificially cheap labor that was nearly 100%
dependent on the company for everything.

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