• water and the beds under it,
• the radio spectrum,
• docks,
• rights of way,
• take-off/landing time slots for aircraft,
• aquifers,
• ambient air (the right to breathe it and the license to pollute),
• "air rights" to strata in the third dimension of cities,
• falling water,
• wild fish, game, and vegetation,
• natural scenery,
• weather,
• the environment,
• the ecology,
• the natural gene pool, etc. 
• Any franchise, license or privilege giving territorial rights is a species of easement over land. 
• Your driver's license is a right to use land;
• red lights remind us of the critical value of space at central locations, since two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. 
• It is worth a lot to have the right-of-way, as railroads do.

Michiganders are saying they must wait and see, but there is no need for that: California can show you 17 years of experience. To read your future, just study our past. Here is what has happened since California passed Proposition 13 in 1978.

• They turned property from a functional concept into a sacred one; from a commission to be enterprising, hire people, produce goods, and pay taxes into a welfare entitlement.
• They rejected the concept of a tax on inert wealth in favor of the rival concept of taxing liquidity and cash flow.

Why is that not happening today, 1995? An invisible, pervasive change is Proposition 13, which makes it possible to hold land at negligible tax cost. In 1945 land was taxed at 3% every year, building a fire under holdouts to turn their land to use. Today that same tax cost is well below 1%. Using Gwartney's Rule of Thumb, it is about 1/8 of 1%: a rate of 1% applied to 1/8 of the true value.

Landowners are only taxed now if they use their land to hire people and produce something useful. Then they meet the drag of our high business and employment and sales taxes, necessitated by the fall of property taxes. A handful of oligopolistic landowners control most of the market; small businesses are squeezed out. This helps us segue from being at the cutting edge of industrial progress to a third-world economy - from the NH model to the AL model - with little relief in sight. ...

100 years ago, American Georgists made a big point that city land outvalues rural land many times over. One implication is that taxing city land is taxing the rich, and we can ignore farmland. Some land-taxers counsel that farmers are easily misled to oppose us, so leave them alone and convert the cities. But rich city folks also own choice rural lands.

• The Hearst palace at San Simeon sits amid 82,000 manorial acres, including miles of prime shoreline, "improved" with just one home per 82,000 acres. This home, jammed with imported treasures, had become a white elephant even before Citizen Kane uttered his final "Rosebud." The heirs were glad to fob it off onto the taxpayers of California, deducting its alleged value from their taxable incomes, while they kept the 82,000 acres.
• Craig McCaw, who made his billions by amassing spectrum licenses, turned some of the pile into a spread of many thousands of acres stretching north from Big Sur -- land he never got around to using.
• The O'Neill families and Donald Bren of Orange County,
• the Newhall family of Ventura County,
• the Chandler family that owns the Tejon and Boswell empires that spread over several counties,
• Ted Turner who owns over a million acres around the U.S.;
• the Koch brothers of Kansas with all their oil wells,
• the Kleberg tribe with their million-acre King Ranch in Texas;
• the Southern Pacific Railroad (now Catellus Co.),
• Standard Oil:

The privilege of use-value assessment stretches even beyond farmlands, vast as they are. Timberland in most states gets the same preferred treatment, only better. About 1/3 of the privately owned land in the U.S. is in timber. In California, owners (mostly huge corporations) may put the land into the "TPZ" class. The standing timber is then exempt, and taxed only at harvest, at 2.9%, much too low a rate to make up for a 60-year lifetime of exemption. County assessors have to value the land separately on its putative value for growing timber, following a State-legislated formula that is tailored drastically to understate even that low value (California Revenue and Tax Code, Section 434.5). Much of that land, though, has alternative uses, e.g. for retirement and vacation homes and resorts, the outliers and pioneers of urban sprawl. There are also mineral values, hunting, fishing, rifle ranges, grazing, campsites, tourism, rights of way, lumber camps, loading sites, water sources, lakes, log storage, landings - there are many things to do with 1/3 of a nation's land. Those uses are all declared "compatible" with timber, hence land values derived therefrom are tax-exempt.  Read the whole article

• George reconciled common land rights with private tenure, free markets, and modern capitalism.
  a. Those who got the upper hand by securing land tenures would support public services, so wages and commerce and capital formation could go untaxed.  
  b. To pay the taxes, landowners would have to use the land by hiring workers (or selling to owner-operators and owner-residents). This would raise demand for labor; labor spending would raise demand for final products.
  c. To pay the workers, landowners would have to produce and sell goods, raising supply and precluding inflation. Needed capital would come to their aid by virtue of its being untaxed.
• George's proposal lets us lower taxes on labor without raising taxes on capital.
• Georgist tax policy reconciles equity and efficiency.
• A state, provincial, or local government can finance generous public services without driving away business or population.
• Georgist tax policy contains urban sprawl, and its heavy associated costs, without overriding market decisions or consumer preferences, simply by making the market work better.
• Georgist tax policy makes jobs without inflation, and without deficits.
• George's land tax lets a polity attract people and capital en masse, without diluting its resource base.
• Georgist policies let us conserve ecology and environment while also making jobs, by abating sprawl.
• Georgist policies let us strengthen public revenues while in the same process promoting economy in government.  Read the whole article

Blight is not restricted to stagnant or declining cities. In booming Los Angeles, there is Watts. In nearby Riverside, one of the fastest growing cities in the nation, the CBD [Central Business District] is surrounded by blight which, among other things, frustrates years of subsidies aimed at reviving the moribund CBD itself.

These extreme cases are not anomalies, not simply ghettoes and embarrassments; they are symptoms of systemic malfunction. They could be portents and symbols for the rest of the economy. Blight may be defined as failure to maintain, replace, and renew capital inherited from the past. Studies indicate that all of American industry faces this problem, compared with vigorous foreign competitors. In learning to cure blight, we may learn to restore the greatness and pride of this whole troubled nation.

There is also good news: some cities have risen from the grave. Indeed, all land development is resurrection in a sense: all land has been used before for something. The history of a city lot usually shows that there were several antecedent improvements, layered like the ruins of ancient Troy. The goal should be to make renewal happen faster and more widely, while we are still here to benefit. ...

Some cities should be abandoned.

Towns around played-out mines are obvious examples. A farm town becomes redundant when new roads let customers patronize a larger or better town. Salvage what you can and move on.

Some would apply the same logic to all cities. Dead cities aren't lost, they say, but rebuilt elsewhere; they were cash cows that have been milked dry. Their depreciation allowances are reinvested on new frontiers; people and vitality move with the capital. It is an important half-truth, but a half-truth is also half wrong. The basic original site stays put; land cannot move. Public and private social capital cannot move, either.

We cannot afford throwaway cities in a finite world. New natural sites are not common. There is only one Hudson Valley with only one mouth, and here New York City has stood for 350 years. We cannot abandon the Bronx and duplicate its environment somewhere; we cannot rebuild the natural setting, and the sunk social capital is too costly. Relocating to suburbs involves commuting cost in terms of money and congestion. And then, when we tire of the new suburbs, where will we go next?

Furthermore, blighted areas have high potential market values. Picture a topographic map of a city where the contour lines represent points not of equal elevation, but of equal market value per square foot. The peaks, the Everests and McKinleys, are in the city retail centers, where just one square foot rises to $2,000 (about $90 million per acre). Land just a few miles away from dizzying altitudes can hardly be worthless. Harlem is near Park Avenue; Watts is near Beverly Hills; South State Street is very near the Sears Tower. Newark is 15 minutes by train from Manhattan. Newark office rents are $25/sf per year. That is less, of course, than in Manhattan, but in Riverside, California, we are throwing up offices to get rent of $12/sf per year, while Newark stagnates.

Land prices vary extremely from city to city or block to block. The cost to build a square foot of floor space is fairly constant from place to place, but demand varies with location. A small rise in floor rental translates into a large rise in ground rent and land price, because the land owner gets everything above what is required to operate and amortize the building. Thus,

• in Riverside, neighborhood mall space rental of $12 just pays for the building, with only a little left over, resulting in land prices of perhaps $5-$8/sf.
  
• In Manhattan, rentals are triple those in Riverside; all surplus accrues to ground rent, resulting in land prices 300 times higher than in Riverside.

Land prices across cities and neighborhoods are much more differentiated than other measures economists commonly cite. For example, the median income in upper east side Manhattan is about 8 times higher than north of Central Park, while the price of land per square foot is probably 40 times higher. Urban land is also highly concentrated in ownership; a handful of people and corporations own most of it. A growing share of income property is held by wealthy aliens, who want to diversify and acquire secure wealth they can manage by remote control. Aliens even hold a good deal of residential property in international "jet set" communities.

• Rent control
• "French Equity" (Equity in Kind):  Today we approach French Equity indirectly, and expensively. We distribute land haphazardly, but seek to make every parcel equally good by extending utilities and roads to all parcels on the same terms, regardless of cost or location.

Economists call such schemes "postage stamp pricing," because postal rates do not vary with delivery costs. Manhattan has 64,000 residents per square mile; Montana has 5.4. It costs a lot more to collect or deliver mail in Montana. The reason postal rates rise is that the U.S. urban population is spreading out more like Montana and less like Manhattan (which once had over 100,000 per square mile). Here are five other examples:

• The British Columbia Ferry Service. ...
  
• British Columbia Hydro....
• Water and sewer service in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin. ...
• State university campuses. ...
• Water supply in California. ...
  

• First, by George, equity need not be in kind. The monetary mechanism overcomes the clumsiness of in-kind equity. If four families inherit a one-family house, all four don't crowd in; they sell and divide the money, or one buys out the others. There is equity in money as well as in real estate. Money is often better; the reinvestment opportunity puts the house on a magic carpet to follow you anywhere. Money is wonderful!
• Second, by George, use the tax mechanism. Do not divide land into unusable morsels, or shackle the market with rent controls, or dissipate rent in subsidies. Give land to the highest bidder, and tax ground rents to support government.

George's land tax promotes equity toward the landless in at least four ways:

• it relieves them of taxes, to the extent that landowners pay more;
• it supplies them with more goods and services, as land is used better;
• it offers them jobs producing those goods and services; and
• it offers them a better chance to acquire land, as surpluses are released to the market.

The counterpart of sharing rent through taxation is to untax things, like buildings, that involve human endeavor. This doubles the incentive effect. If land tax is the stick, untaxing buildings is the corresponding carrot, and George's program makes both larger. Every lot with an old "Defender" building has a potential replacement, the "Challenger." Taxing buildings rigs the fight against the Challenger. Say the lot-cum-Defender is worth $100K, and the Challenger would cost $500K to build. Challenger cash flow must exceed Defender cash flow by enough to pay $500K, plus added taxes based on it.

Riverside built a downtown pedestrian mall when they were in vogue, and has been sorry ever since. It did not work; retailers deserted, and half the stores are empty. I asked the developer of a successful mall why he thought downtown failed, and got a two word answer: "absentee ownership." I should have known, having preached it for years.

Farm advisers say, "The best dressing for soil is the owner's shadow, applied daily." In town they ask, "Who's keeping the store?" Absentees aren't the only negligent owners, nor are they all bad. Torpid owners are the problem, and they come in many forms. A city wants to be rid of owners who see real estate as a cash cow for their retirement, and to replace them with owners who see it as a vehicle for enterprise and who apply their shadows daily. The shadows follow them to local civic clubs and to enterprising downtown or neighborhood associations for making joint improvements.

The surplus to land attracts outside buyers. Absentees, redundant parties in production, are often top bidders for pure ownership, which is the legal right to receive land rent plus unearned increments that accrue over time. Georgist taxation cuts directly into rents and unearned increments, which attract absentee owners; it spares the rewards of enterprise. It thereby effects a market transfer of ownership from absentees to occupants, with the community benefits that follow. In a period of rising concern over alien takeovers of U.S. real estate, these points merit focused attention.

Land taxation, if vigorously applied, tends to reduce the investment value of land, through a process called "tax capitalization." With land devalued, those needing wealth acquire substitute assets by saving more, and investing the savings in real new capital rather than land.

• One is to increase job opportunity, which in turn reduces welfare spending. More productive job opportunities should reduce pressure for military spending of a boondoggling, make-jobs nature as well.
• The other is to eliminate urban sprawl and its wasteful cross-subsidies.

But George's program begins with fostering renewal and intensive use. Clearance is involved only to serve renewal, never as a goal in itself. The first land taken would generally be vacant or with boarded-up buildings. New buildings would draw renters and buyers from old ones, releasing more space. The idea and impact are to increase rentable, salable floor space. There would also be more firms to compete in selling and hiring. How do we know there would be an aggregate increase in supply?

• Higher density is one test. Untaxing buildings fosters higher density because density, exemplified by high buildings, substitutes capital for land. Untaxing capital obviously makes it more economical.
• Higher quality is the other test. The richer the new tenants or buyers, the more space is released when they move. This is the hardest point for advocates of the poor to accept. There will always be specific cases where the rich bump the poor, leading to contemptuous names like "trickle-down" that dismiss effects on the market. But the aggregate is what should concern us. If tenants mobilize against new construction, a minority with a vested interest harms everyone else, including the poor. Building new homes for the rich, who can afford them, releases usable space for everyone else.

There are three kinds of slums.

• Only the narrowest kind, the slum on high-value land, causes eviction of the poor to benefit the rich. Owners in these uncommon areas neglect their buildings, expecting to demolish them for expanding commerce or high-rise apartments.
• The second kind is on bad land which will stay bad.
• The third, and most common, kind is on good land with old buildings that have filtered down to people who generate bad neighborhood effects. Units go vacant; land value is low. The market renews these slums not in a stroke, but by nibbling at the fringes. Yet as it nibbles incrementally in, it unavoidably creates more space than it consumes, raising aggregate supply.

Nothing is better for people than to be competed for. It raises their bargaining power as tenants, buyers, and workers.

With all that talk of capital and efficiency, remember that we began with a quest for justice in sharing rent surplus. Justice and efficiency are not at odds; we can have both. The trade-off expounded by many economists is to enervate us so we won't do anything. Yet we have shown not just that we can have both, but more; we cannot have either without the other. If we do not share rents in the efficient Georgist manner, social and political pressures will cause inefficient sharing and eventual dissipation.

This is what economic policy can do. The basic impulses, however, the striving for justice and brotherhood, and the sense of personal ethics, come from within, and from family, community, schools, and religion. So does the sense of workmanship, the striving for excellence without which no system works.

There are city councilpersons who can corrupt the best system ever blueprinted. The Georgist program may even help to straighten them out. Lincoln Steffens taught us that the villain in Eden was neither Eve nor the serpent, but the apple! The apples of discord that corrupt city councils are unearned increments to land value, which they create or deny with every decision on extending sewers or changing zoning. Georgist tax dehydrates those apples by attaching higher tax to each unearned increment.

For better or worse, California has recalled its governor and elected Arnold Schwarzenegger (A.S.) to replace him. A.S. has revealed no specifics of how he will stanch our deficit. He campaigned on generalities: he is against taxes, against waste in government, against measures to rein in vehicle use, and nostalgic about the good old days when Governor Pat Brown was spending heavily on roads and water projects. No one seems sure how he will connect the dots. After his first visit to Sacto last week, he seemed not sure, either.

His choice of advisors, however, tells us A.S. will repeat Pete Wilson's performance from the early 1990s. Chief of Staff Patricia Clarey is a good soldier from Wilson's old staff; Auditor Donna Arduin is from Jeb Bush's Florida. The gurus who set the doctrinal tone give the clearest hints: they are neo-classical economists of deepest dye. These are advisors George Shultz and Michael Boskin from the Hoover Institution. Economics, to them, is a set of dismal choices. California's choice is to cut public services, or lose business and jobs. That is what they told Wilson in 1994. All taxes are the same, always "burdens," always driving away "business."  ...

It is also alleged that land values are too small to support government. Let us test that idea. In 2003, at the current rate, there will be about 15,000 "confirmed" sales of owner-occupied urban California residences at prices over $1 million. That is from DataQuick, a standard source of current real estate data. 15,000 is about 2.7% of all confirmed sales. Some of those go much higher. The mean is probably over $2 million.

Turnover of costlier homes is lower than that of ordinary homes. (For example, turnover of existing homes is 30% greater in Riverside County, with lower values, than in Orange County, with higher values.) 2% a year is a fair guess at the turnover of homes valued at $1 million or more. If so, there are 50 x 15,000, or 750,000 homes in Calif valued at a mean $2 millions. Their aggregate value is 750,000 x $2million = $1.5 trillions.

These are not large buildings: they average 2864 s.f., with 4 bdrms, 3 baths. In the north end of Sta. Monica, a vacant lot alone is over $1m. They are not new buildings: only 9% are new. It's the land that makes them worth so much.

• the Lucas compound and the Pritzker family compound in Marin;
• San Simeon;
• the Reagan Ranch and similar holdings in the northern half of Sta. Barbara Cnty;
• fashionable winery properties in choice valleys statewide;
• the Chandler family's Tejon Ranch;
• the 200,000 acres of James Boswell in the Tulare Lake Basin; etc.

Outline of remarks by Mason Gaffney, for use at Moscow Congress, 5/21/96 

Second, some goes as a return to capital, over replacement. This is pure income. Income to capital is not a taxable surplus, but a functional incentive: it moves people to form and supply capital. This entails securing new capital (by saving, and borrowing) and conserving old capital (avoiding dissaving, and avoiding export of capital).

Capital income serves another useful function: it steers capital into the most productive uses. Steering capital to its best uses has the same useful function as securing new capital, and conserving old. Using capital effectively is as beneficial as securing more capital, and ever so much cheaper. The Great Transition in Russia now is learning to allow income on capital, to secure these benefits. The trick is to do it without allowing more than is needed.

The rest of the excess over wages is captured in the rent of land. It is a true taxable surplus. The amount is already huge, and will become huger yet when existing taxes are abated.

The size of rent is not reported in capitalist nations, except to trivialize it. Their national accountants, dominated by landowners, neglect or conceal it artfully, to protect it from being taxed. Local governments do, however, measure and tax property by value. More than half the value of property is land. In Vancouver, B.C., 73% of the value of all property assessed for taxation is land, even though much land there is exempt from tax, and not assessed at all. In California's major cities it would be just as high if only we assessed land here as accurately as they do there.

3. Rent will become huger yet when you abate taxes presently levied on production and exchange, because these now depress the rent of land. That is, in a tax-free market economy, the benefit of abating present taxes will lodge mainly in land rents. The taxable surplus simply shifts from one form to another.

This is more than a simple shift of a fixed amount. When you substitute land revenues for existing taxes, the surplus actually grows, as if by synergy. You gain more revenue base than you lose, because existing taxes now suppress much latent production. Payroll taxes directly drive workers from taxable jobs to untaxed gains from crime. Abating those taxes will unleash suppressed economic giants, along with all the new surplus values their latent production will generate. "Monetarists" warn you that "there are no free lunches." In fact, however, good policy creates lots of "free lunches." It makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Imagine the benefits, alone, of turning people from destructive careers in crime to useful jobs producing goods.

At the same time, the effect of socializing land revenues is to stimulate better land use - the opposite of the effect of existing taxes. Every landowner, to pay the required land charge, is pushed to steer his land to the best use (just as paying interest steers capital to its best use). Thus, the shift to rent-based revenues doubly induces new production: it releases the brake of present taxes, and replaces it with an added push to produce. This is "supply-side economic policy" in the best and truest sense. It generates yet more surplus. You may take all of rent to support government functions, without damaging private market incentives, but only sharpening them.

5. Many varieties of natural resources generate rents. City land is the greatest single source. For example, one city, Vancouver, contains half the value of taxable property in B.C. - a province of 934,000 sq. kilometers, or 70% larger than France.

However, many other resources yield rents. Some of them are also huge in value, even though some are inconspicuous. Here are a few varieties of them:

Some of those varied resources are highly valued. For example,

• newly minted fishing permits offshore of Washington State sell for $1 million each. Their owners retire and rent the permits to working fishermen, creating an instant class structure where before there was equal opportunity. Imagine the value of an exclusive right to take Caspian sturgeon.
• Radio spectrum amassed by the McCaw Company recently passed to AT&T for $13 billions.
• Dmitri Lvov estimates that your oil and gas revenues alone could support the entire national government (Practicable Course of Economic Reforms in Russia. Moscow: Russian Academy of Sciences, Central Economics and Mathematics Institute, 1994). They might even surpass urban rents in value, if they were valued at world market prices.
• In arid lands, access to water is life itself. Read the whole article

But the most delightful distinction about Canadians is the strong and explicit recognition among almost everyone, even if he's an economist, who discusses this subject, that different resource endowments are the basis of inter-provincial differences. Equalisation in Canadian politics means sharing the economic rent. Everybody talks that way. Canadian economists even when they come to the States talk that way. Just as though rent were a permissible word in polite discourse. It's very refreshing. However there's a very selective attitude towards rent -- towards what rents are shareable, I should say.

• Rents from oil and gas are fair game.
• Forest revenues are fair game.
• Mineral revenues of other kinds are fair game.
• Water power is fair game.

But now how about the rents that are generated by the valuable lands of Montreal, or Toronto, or some of those other big and powerful cities in the east? They are not fair game. As a matter of fact, if you pore through the fine print of the equalization law, which I did on the airplane, you find the most interesting exception to what's included in the formula. I'll explain the formula to you in a moment if you are still awake. ...

The conclusion of all this is that the Canadian system is really better in terms of its Georgist implications because the payments to the provinces, with all the faults that I've described, are essentially based on population. Population is in the formula. And if you compare this with the way things are done in the States, population plays a very minor role in the formula for equalisation payments in the United States.

1. Worthy goals often conflict with each other A. Corn vs. Barley B. New rules C. Unresolved conflicts D. Danger of isolation through overkill
2. The Dereliction of Economists A. Defining away land  B. Private property: from means to end C. Leapfrogging, floating value, and compensation  D. Siege mentalities
3. Gifford Pinchot's Winning Formula A. Defining "Conservation" B. Finding common ground
4. Pinchot on "Development"
5. Urban Sprawl A. Development is not identical with Sprawl   B. Sprawl is not a quest for open space   C. Sprawl is not the product of free choice   D. Looking for Mr. Goodbar   E. The public pays twice  F. Proactive solutions
6. Dig deep

Some of the losers in the market game are not willing to grin and bear it. Instead, they write new rules; they want to play a different game. Soilsmen did this long since. They like to classify land and rank it by its potentiality for growing crops. Farming is - to them - the ultimate value, so it is the highest and best use: cities may have what's left over. It is perhaps poetic justice that habitat-savers are now doing the same thing to farmers. They conceive highest use as that which saves endangered species: soils and farming may be damned, right along with housing, commerce, transportation, industry, storage, water supply, waste disposal, fire control, education, religion, mining, government, national defense, recreation, and whatever else needs land. All human activities, and survival itself, need land, so that list is a long one. Each constituent of the other uses becomes an enemy.

Thus, to restore citriculture and habitat in what is now L.A. we would move the city folks to hazard-prone floodplains, steep slopes subject to fire and erosion, quake-prone fault lines and liquefiable soils, etc. We would also move them away from the center, imposing longer commutes, greater auto-dependency, longer utility lines, longer hauls to dispose of solid wastes, more air to protect, more aquifer surface to protect, more land to protect from flooding, etc. ...

There is another kind of fundamentalist, the private property kind. The economics profession (my tribe) has, in recent years, largely abdicated its proper role as an arbitrator and gone over mainly to the side of private-property extremism. This is the essential meaning of "Neo-classical Economics," which is the idiom of most discourse in the field today, both in business and in the profession.

How did economics get so twisted? Don't blame Adam Smith, or David Ricardo, or John Stuart Mill, or John E. Cairnes, or Knut Wicksell, or Philip Wicksteed, sterling 19th Century writers. Rather, blame J.B. Clark, Karl Marx, Richard T. Ely, Alvin Johnson, Frank Fetter, Frank Knight, George Stigler, and a host of lesser figures who gradually warped economics into its present form. How did they do it?

• Man subjects land to private tenure. ...
• Man improves the raw land, pumping value into it. ...

Neoclassical economics, historically, marked the final, total surrender of the profession to this fetish. The modern economist's view runs something like this: "I pledge allegiance to the 14th Amendment, and to the overinterpretation of private landowner supremacy for which it has come to stand." It is ironic to recall that Radical Republicans passed that Amendment, at a time when a "Radical Republican" was one who favored freeing the slaves. The 14th Amendment was designed to protect the rights of freedmen. As interpreted now, the 14th Amendment means that The Emancipation Proclamation itself was unconstitutional! Fortunately, no one has brought that case - yet.

The Neo-classical economists' view of their proper role is rather like that in The Realtor's Oath, which includes a vow "To protect the individual right of real estate ownership." The word "individual" is construed broadly to include corporations, estates, trusts, anonymous offshore funds, schools, government agencies, institutions, partnerships, cooperatives, the Duke of Westminster, the Sultan of Brunei, the Medellin Cartel, Saddam Hussein, congregations, Archbishops, families (including criminal families) and so on, but "individual" sounds more all-American and subsumes them all. This is a potent chant that stirs people to extremes of self-righteousness and siege mentality when challenged.

The resemblance between Neo-classical economics and the Realtor's Oath is easier to understand when you learn that Professor Richard T. Ely, founder of the modern discipline of Land Economics, was heavily subsidized by the National Association of Real Estate Boards, the utilities, the major landowning railroads, and others of like mind and property interests.

When it comes to violating property rights, air pollution today is perhaps the greatest invader and confiscator of property. Where do economists stand? Once a few of them tried to say, following A.C. Pigou, "let the polluter pay," and in parts of Europe they still do. In our modern backward thinking here at home, however, it's not the polluter who is invading the property of others, nor the human rights of those not owning property. Rather, when you tell them to stop, the government is invading their rights. The wage-earning taxpayers must pay them to stop, else you are violating both the 14th Amendment and the "Coase Theorem," a rationalization for polluting now dearly beloved by Neo-classical economists.

Urban sprawl, which creates a psychological effect of great crowding, is not the product of development as such, but of leapfrogging. Leapfrogging means chaos, with development in the wrong places and times. Infilling, on the other hand, is anti-sprawl. It is the cure for sprawl.

In British Columbia, people move around a good deal by car-ferry, because of the terrain. The Provincial Government ("The Crown Provincial") runs the system. There are many lovely little islands in the Straits of Georgia, between Vancouver Island and the mainland, favored by the wealthy, the exclusive and reclusive. Being more sybaritic than Henry D. Thoreau, and politically puissant, they have demanded and received car-ferry service. This service costs about $10 for every $1 in revenue. The resulting deficit is covered by raising rates on the main plebeian line, Victoria-Vancouver. Naturally, these cheap ferries attract new visitors to the islands, and new demand for land there.

Potential builders are little concerned with the social costs they might impose, so long as others are to bear them. Thus, they sometimes settle for and build

• on steep lands (like Malibu Hills) with flammable brush and erosion problems,
• on flood plains (like Victoria Woods subdivision in Riverside),
• on soils subject to liquefaction in quakes (like Northridge),
• in canyons and arroyos,
• on lands with limited access for emergency equipment.
• They even build on lands without water supply, even in arid southern California, then demand water and get it, secure in the knowledge that Sacramento rejected a recent move to ban development in areas with no assured water supply. ...

I could wax rhapsodic about the results to expect from such taxation, but have done so elsewhere and will leave it with a word: visit Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane, Copenhagen, or Johannesburg, which have made use of this principle to excellent effect.

It is said we need a land use inventory. We already have lots of them: people have been classifying land for decades. The question is, what shall we do with them?

It is said we need "risk ratings." These are subject to manipulation and juggling, like benefit/cost analyses of recent ill fame. The question is, who will control the ratings, and to what ends?

It is said we need fire models. We have fire models; they were already chic in 1950. The question is, how to keep scattered homes out of fire-prone areas, where they make prescribed controlled burning nearly impossible. The question is how to keep the State and the fire insurance industry from cross-subsidizing these homes by averaging their risks in with others.

Rather, let us study how to emulate the model of Butchart Gardens, near Victoria, B.C. Butchart doesn't sound like a gardener's name, and sure enough, Mr. Butchart was a hardrock miner who attacked the earth and left a great ugly gash in it. Ah, but Mrs. Butchart, she wanted space for a garden, so she made one there. She rediscovered the truth that land is not just the matter that occupies space, it is space, always renewable and reclaimable. Now Butchart Gardens is one of the world's great beauty spots, drawing visitors from everywhere - in the summertime you hear every language there. Our decayed central cities, too, may bloom again like Mrs. Butchart's garden. Let us make it our model.  read the whole article

2. "Real Property is Sacred and Untouchable"  Wrong! Suppose this layman writer and the Oregon Chief Justice were in error, and water permits were real property. That is out of the frying pan, into the fire.

What does 'real' mean, applied to property or estate? It is not the opposite of 'imaginary.' No, 'real' is an elided English form of the French 'regal' taken into English when English kings spoke their native French. Real property is The King's.

We threw out kings in 1783, but not the royal powers. Rather, we transferred those powers to our State governments. By succession, real property means government property!

Every landowner is a tenant of the king or his successors in interest. The very word 'own' comes from 'owe.' An owner is one who owes. What he owed historically was fealty to his sovereign.

That used to mean bending the knee, kissing the royal foot, swearing allegiance, and showing up on demand to smite the enemy.

It has evolved into servitudes like eminent domain, police power, the public trust doctrine, and something else that our lawyers may have glided over, but economists underline: the tax power.

These concepts are basic to common law which has been brought into every U.S. state constitution (save Louisiana's). Moses was not just whistling Dixie when he quoted The Lord as saying "The land shall not be sold forever; for the land is mine, and ye are strangers and sojourners with me." ...

The owner must be left with some 'economically viable' use, meaning almost any use whose revenues exceed expenses, however small the net gain.

As to other property, well! No one has yet been compensated for losing the fruits of his sweated brow to the IRS, at rates which once soared as high as 90% in the top bracket.

With dearer water you use less by controlling it better, switching from primitive furrow irrigation to sprinklers, spitters and drip.

This in turn lets you do new things like growing avocados on steep hillsides formerly barren, yielding more dollars of product for less water (and in this case on waste land).

The above facts point to a fascinating, portentous corollary: you can tax water withdrawals without wrecking the water economy.

On the contrary, such taxes (carefully crafted to be constructive) can encourage conservation, getting more bins and bales for the bucket, so to speak.

Americans are raised on anti-tax slogans masquerading as economic analysis, always presuming taxes destroy good incentives and wreck the economy.

If it is oil, we all know mineral rights are routinely severed from surface rights by sale, reservation or lease. Water can be subject to constraints, too.   ...

A simple solution to half our tractable water problems would be a severance tax on water withdrawals. If you can regulate it you can tax it.

A tax can be viewed as nothing more than an economic price charged by the owner of water (the state) for using its property. ...

7. "Economics is hostile to environmentalism"

Partly wrong, although some economists are guilty as charged. Economics, properly pursued, deals with how best to meet human wants. Recreation, fishing, wildlife, amenities, clean air, pure water, sustained resource supply, watershed protection, good health, and conservation are legitimate human wants.

Many economists, I confess and deplore, are blind to such values, and think only of maximizing GNP measured in the brutal old-fashioned way, developed during World War II for war's emergency purposes and never revised.

Others, cowed by cow college deans, dare not think at all, and write only of sustaining farm land values: damn the cost to others.

In 1879, George electrified the world by identifying one underlying cause for two great economic plagues:

• chronic poverty arising from insufficient demand for labor, and
• cycles of boom and bust.

These twin plagues arose from concentrated ownership of land, compounded by land speculation. Large landowners and speculators (often one and the same) held the best land idle or underused, forcing labor onto marginal land and driving down wages. Collapse of speculative land price bubbles caused periodic slumps.

(By "land" George meant exclusive rights to use natural resources in a specified territory. It included mining, water, fishing, and timber rights, road and rail rights-of way, and some patents. George emphasized the high value and productivity of urban land, which facilitated communication and trade. Today, we would add to "land" such items as taxi medallions, telecommunications licenses and pollution "rights".)

George followed his analysis with a plausible, practicable remedy: eliminate all taxes except for a tax on land values. The "single tax," as it later became known, would invigorate the economy by breaking up large idle holdings, making land available to those who would use it. And it would suck the air out of speculative bubbles, damping the boom and bust cycle.

• Taxing land is very progressive because land ownership is highly concentrated among the most wealthy, far more concentrated than income.
• Taxing land is fair, because the community rather than the individual landowner creates land values.
• Taxing land is economically efficient, because the owner cannot avoid a land tax ("shift" it) by choosing less-taxed options. ...

In the US, "Georgism" melded into the populist movement, and later into the Progressive Movement. At the national level, the Progressive Movement dominated both major political parties for 17 years, 1902-19. At the local level, its influence continued through the early 1920s. Local property taxation was modified along Georgist lines: land assessments were raised relative to improvements and rates were increased substantially. California water districts financed by land taxes catapulted California to the top-producing farm state in the Union, using land that had been desert or range. California generated farm jobs and homes, while other states destroyed them by allowing well-connected speculators and "robber barons" to grab large tracts of land. A Georgist, Congressman Warren Worth Bailey of Pennsylvania, drafted the first Federal personal income tax law on Georgist lines: falling mainly on very high incomes from property. ...

Neo-classical economists give us only a hard choice: we may have equity, or efficiency, but not both. By contrast, George's program reconciles equity and efficiency. Think of it! George takes two polar philosophies, collectivism and individualism, and composes them into one solution. He cuts the Gordian knot. Like Keynes after him, George inspires us by saying, "Forget the bitter tradeoffs; we can have it all!"    Read the whole article

It is part of George's genius that his proposals solve one problem by resolving it with another, turning two problems into one solution. It is something like tuning up the orchestra for a concert, turning dissonance into harmony, and keeping the beat together, turning cacaphony into rhythm. It is the mark of good solutions that they reconcile and resolve, rather than simply "trade-off." [If you ever immerse yourself in mathematics deeply enough to find