Mason Gaffney wrote: >----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- >John Medaille's gloomy assessment of how concentrated wealth will always >beat back Georgist taxation is more downbeat than history warrants, IMHO. I >suggest a look at *New Life in Old Cities*, 2006, (NY: Robert Schalkenbach >Fdtn, ISBN 0-911312-92-7). This work documents how Georgeish (if not 100% >Georgist) policies were applied in many American cities during their various >golden ages of fast population growth. Mason, with respect, I must point out that your examples reinforce my point rather than refute it, because they are all in the past; that is, they have all been beaten back. This is certainly the impression I get from reading "Land-Value Taxation Around the World, Second Edition," edited by Robert Andelson, a staunch Georgist. The practical problem of Georgism has always been how to value the economic rent, and the political problem has always been how to maintain the system in the face of concentrated ownership. After all, Georgism is an attack on land speculation, and those who would speculate must first get rid of the LVT. My own guess is that the LVT cannot be maintained in the face of concentrated ownership, and that distributed ownership cannot be maintained without an LVT. Nor was I arguing against the adequacy of the LVT for the proper purposes of government, but rather for it. As for the improper purposes of government, no source is ever adequate, nor should it be; this helps to explain our $9 Trillion debt ($44T if you throw in the social funds). Putting the gov't on a diet and cutting off other sources of funds, and particularly the source called the "income tax" but really a labor tax, is one of the chief advantages of the LVT. On another note, we can see some effects of an approximation of the LVT in the current housing crises. I read in the paper this morning that home values have dropped 11% across the country, but only 3% here in Texas. Texas relies on the property tax rather than income taxes, and the property tax approximates (imperfectly) an LVT. As a result, property values did not run up as much as they did in income tax states, and won't run down as much. Somewhere there must be a study of the effects of proposition 13 on California's home prices; I suspect that the exaggerated values could not have happened without prop 13. John C. M?daille