Pat Gunning wrote:
>To Mason and John:
>
>It occurs to me that your main interest is not 
>in how to interpret Clark. It is in Georgism.


Thanks for the assignment of motives, but I am 
not a Georgist; one does not have to be a 
Georgist to agree with Ricardo on the Law of Rents.

As for the entrepreneur and land, there is 
nothing an entrepreneur can do to increase the 
value of land. He can, of course, use the land or 
place improvements on it, and rent those out, but 
the value of the land itself will not change. The 
value comes from the surrounding population, not from the entrepreneur.

The proof is simple. If I build two buildings 
with identical blueprints, one in Dallas and one 
in Muleshoe, they will command different rents. 
The difference cannot be the difference in 
buildings (they are same) nor in entrepreneurship 
(it is the same). The difference comes entirely 
in the ground rent. And the difference in the 
ground rent comes entirely from the difference in 
population. The ground rent is a social product, 
not an entrepreneurial product. The entrepreneur 
profits from the surrounding population, but he 
did not create it. Unless he is unusually prolific.

John C. M?daille