--- Deirdre McCloskey wrote:

> Giving unvoted revenue sources to a government is
> like giving whiskey to teenage boys.

The argument for taxing land values is best done with
a comparative systems approach, namely, taxing land
value versus taxing wages, profits, exchanges, and
goods.

If one is opposed to a land tax because one is opposed
to all taxation, then that is a separate argument.  

The relevant issue is, given taxation, which ones do
the least damage?  There, the Physiocrats, Adam Smith,
David Ricardo, J.S. Mill, Henry George, Knut Wicksell,
Harry Gunnison Brown, and Milton Friedman all
concluded that taxing land is less bad than taxing
other things. 

> That's my Public-Choicey point here: we need to be
> construing the government we actually have, not an
imagined group of philosopher kings 
> who have read Ricardo and Henry George with critical
> care. 

Public choice theory tells us why government officials
rejectr land-value taxation despite its economic
merits.

But there is still dispute among economists as to the
merits of land-value taxation, so it is still worth
investigating its theory and history of thought.

> That we do not live in a world in 
> which margins are equalized in all other directions
> has always struck me 
> as a devastating criticism of proposals for
> delicately Pigovian-Samuelsonian social engineering,
as my heroes Knight, Buchanan, 
> Coase have said. 

That is not clear.  For example, the fact that there
are numerous ill-advised highway policies does not
detract from the case for having a 65mph speed limit
rather than 55 mph.  Would you say there was no good
case for raising back the speed limit to 65 because we
live in a second-best world full of traffic
distortions?

> Let's stick with a robust mythology of private 
> property, which has served us well

But taxing wages, profits, and sales of goods
socializes these.  Labor and enterprise are not purely
private.  So given socialization, the question then is
what does the least damage, socializing labor and
enterprise, or socializing land rent?

Fred Foldvary