Rental attitudes

Your coverage of the plight of hotels facing rates increases (report and editorial, 18 March) raises strategic issues for all recession-hit businesses. We need a new method of raising public finance that does not inhibit economic activity, is socially just and is unavoidable.

Your editorial mentions rental values and herein is the key to such a public finance system: the universal collection of land rental values. This would be based on the unimproved value of the land and not the buildings or economic activity that exists on any given site. Essentially, a shift away from taxing what we do and make, as individuals or businesses, and instead going over to paying society rent for what we hold and take, for we should remember it is the demand from society that creates those rental values in the first place. In this way we can pay society its just due, while at the same time increasing individual and corporate wealth.

RON GREER

Blair Atholl