" /> Building a world of resilient communities.    What should
we tax?  For some time a small group of ecological economists
has been suggesting that we switch the tax base from income
(value added to natural resources by labor and capital), and on
to natural resources themselves. Value added to resources is
something we want more of, so don’t tax it (either at each stage
of production as in Europe, or at the final stage as income as
in the U.S.). The resource throughput, beginning with depletion
and ending with pollution (both real costs), is something we
want less of in a full world economy, so let’s tax it. Even
though resources in the ground and waste absorption services are
free gifts of nature in the cost of production sense, they are
nevertheless increasingly scarce in a full world. They need a
price to be efficiently allocated and not overused. So let’s
give them the needed price by taxing them, and use the revenue
from the tax (or equivalent cap-auction-trade system) to
substitute for the revenue los