Pat Gunning wrote: >To Mason and John: > >It occurs to me that your main interest is not >in how to interpret Clark. It is in Georgism. Thanks for the assignment of motives, but I am not a Georgist; one does not have to be a Georgist to agree with Ricardo on the Law of Rents. As for the entrepreneur and land, there is nothing an entrepreneur can do to increase the value of land. He can, of course, use the land or place improvements on it, and rent those out, but the value of the land itself will not change. The value comes from the surrounding population, not from the entrepreneur. The proof is simple. If I build two buildings with identical blueprints, one in Dallas and one in Muleshoe, they will command different rents. The difference cannot be the difference in buildings (they are same) nor in entrepreneurship (it is the same). The difference comes entirely in the ground rent. And the difference in the ground rent comes entirely from the difference in population. The ground rent is a social product, not an entrepreneurial product. The entrepreneur profits from the surrounding population, but he did not create it. Unless he is unusually prolific. John C. M?daille