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