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