Warren Samuels said:  
>I would add one point:  The entrepreneurial and other activity of which   
>you and others, e.g., Larry Moss, write, can be explained this way:   
>Remember Marx said that profit was a class activity and its distribution a   
>matter of competition within the bourgeois class.  So, too, may   
>Ricardian-Georgian rent be seen as something to distribute among land   
>owners via the entrepreneurial activity in your examples.  
  
  
I need to respond briefly to Warren's post.  The context is an essay I wrote   
and included in the Laurent book.   The basic Georgist insight is that public   
goods (goods that are nonrivalrous and where excludability presents a   
challenge to the investors to recover their investments )  can be profitably financed in
ways that do not seriously disturb the existing allocation of resources.
    
This, I read as a proposition in largely positive economics. A variation of the   
idea now lives on and is known in the urban economics texts as "the Henry   
George Theorem."   
  
The Henry George "blind spot" comes when gains to the ownership of what is   
essentially "location" are referred to as "unearned" "accidental," "uncaused by   
identifiable labor," etc.   In an entrepreneurial economy, the discovery of   
opportunity is as important as brute labor if not more so. The modern Austrian   
school has persuaded a new generation about the "creativity theory of value" as   
a replacement for the overworked and misleading "labor theory of value."    
  
Isn't this the central finding of modern growth economics ---brain power   
over brawn.  If one were to turn George on his head and state that some "capital   
gains" to land ownership are "anticipated" and perhaps even politically   
brought about by cronyism down at the zoning department in Town Hall, then a new and more
dazzling array of economic discussions can follow.   That was the main
contribution of my essay in the Laruent book.  I was consciously following   
Krugman's advice to bring "location" back into modern economics.  Georgist   
economics shows us one way how that might be done.  
  
By identifying new economic phenomena and explaining them (stories about   
motivation, execution and results) we pay homage of Henry George and his acumen.    
Please notice that I have not mentioned the "single tax" or followed Warren in   
the arena of class analysis or hierarchy in modern society.  Some of the land   
developers in the big cities where I have lived were from humble   
circumstances---immigrant stock in some cases.  Most never heard of Henry George.  
  
Laurence Moss