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From:
[log in to unmask] (John C. Medaille)
Date:
Mon Nov 27 09:37:23 2006
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Mason Gaffney wrote:  
>Maybe Walras was schizophrenic, but maybe, and more likely, he meant that  
>his model of commodity markets presupposed that, and would work well only  
>if, the land market was lubricated by a substantial annual tax based on  
>value, as he urged so vigorously and eloquently in his Theorie d'Economie  
>Sociale. That was certainly the overtly stated view of Henry George, arrived  
>at independently.  
>  
>Jaffe contributed, intentionally or not, to the hijacking of Walras by  
>translating the pure-market-techie stuff long before the land tax work. We  
>should not be blaming Walras entirely for techies who cherry-picked his  
>oeuvres for what they required, and ignored the rest. Likewise we should not  
>blame Henry George for Arthur Laffer, Jr.'s, cherrypicking from his ideas to  
>promote his notoriously overstated Curve. Laffer ignored George's favorable  
>view of taxing land values. Laffer even supported Howard Jarvis's  
>Proposition 13 in California. "Evvaboddy talkin bout Hebbin ain't gwine  
>dere".  
  
  
I was ignorant of Walras's views on land and   
taxation; almost everything I've seen in the   
secondary literature is about general   
equilibrium. But a quick search of the internet   
shows that this might be a profitable study. Thanks.  
  
  
John C. Medaille  

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