John Medaille's gloomy assessment of how concentrated wealth will always
beat back Georgist taxation is more downbeat than history warrants, IMHO. I
suggest a look at *New Life in Old Cities*, 2006, (NY: Robert Schalkenbach
Fdtn, ISBN 0-911312-92-7). This work documents how Georgeish (if not 100%
Georgist) policies were applied in many American cities during their various
golden ages of fast population growth. Assessment reform was integral to
their success. Indeed most of the reform consisted of assessment reform,
using the (William A.) "Somers Unit System" of valuing land first, and
assigning buildings the "residual" (if any) of real estate value above bare
land value. Somers explained his system in *The Valuation of Real Estate for
the Purpose of Taxation* (orig. 1901, plus later editions published by Rich
and Clymer). Several other works reflected the same attitudes of the times:
Richard Hurd, 1902, *Principles of City Land Values*; Frederick Babcock
(1932), *Valuation of Real Estate*; W.W. Pollock and Karl Scholz, 1926,
*Science and practice of urban land valuation*; Lawson Purdy (1929), *The
Assessment of Real Estate*; George C. Olcott and Co., *Land Values Blue Book
of Chicago*, annual 1910-date; and others.

 

Cleveland Mayor Tom L. Johnson, followed by Newton D. Baker, employed Somers
and raised land assessments right under the noses of John D. Rockefeller and
Mark Hanna. Johnson, sainted by muckraker Lincoln Steffens in 1906, *The
Struggle for Self-government*, networked with many other like-minded mayors
and governors and assessors, described in biographies of Edward Dunne of
Chicago, Hazen Pingree of Detroit, Samuel Jones and Brand Whitlock of
Toledo, Lawson Purdy and Charles Evans Hughes and Al Smith of New York, Mark
Fagan and George Record of Jersey City, and others. Johnson's wide sway in
Ohio is recorded passim but at some length in Francis Russell's bio of
Warren Harding, *The Shadow of Blooming Grove*. 

 

Medaille's low estimate of the revenue potential of taxing land values is
refuted in a long chapter on "Adequacy of Land as a Tax Base" in Daniel
Holland (ed.), 1972, *The Assessment of Land Value* (Madison: U of Wis
Press). 

 

Much as I admire Medaille?s intellectual spirit and tolerance, I do not
believe it is fitting, especially in this venue, to render ex cathedra
opinions on a matter without nodding, at least, to the deep history of
economic thought on the subject. 

 

Mason Gaffney