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Explanation as always:

Before we can go about building housing, we first have to buy and use land. Unfortunately, due to issues like land speculation and overly-restrictive zoning, as well as taxing the work and investment that goes into building housing, our ability to buy and use our land is heavily constrained and so too is the amount of housing we get. The housing constraint starts in our tax regimes prioritizing landowners over labor and capital and our laws preventing people from using their land effectively (barring health and safety conditions of course but current law has far overstepped this), and ends when the reverse is true.

For more about this, Greg Miller of the Center of Land Economics wrote a great article about how our housing crisis is actually a land crisis.

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Context:

As has been mentioned many times before, the best way to reform property taxes to make housing affordable is to universally exempt buildings and transform them into taxes on the value of land. Doing so removes the burden placed on making new buildings while keeping the onus on landowners not to hold the finite resource out of use idly, discouraging land speculation and waste while opening land to being used for building things like housing.

Still, this hasn’t stopped some states like Florida from enacting property tax cuts. Instead of building more housing to keep their state affordable to the younger and poorer who don’t own land, these states instead prefer protecting homeowners even if it costs their economy’s future while increasing inequality through the land.

Here’s a list of states that are proposing to cut or cap property taxes:

See The Daily Renter’s full Meme of the Week series here

Author’s note: Sorry for the hiatus, MOTW postings are making a comeback

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Explanation:

Amid the ongoing property tax revolt, it’s important to remember that there is a good yolk of necessity in the property tax that should be followed rather than shied away from, that being the need to recompense land.

Right now our property taxes include both the building and land in its valuation. The former has issues since it can discourage building and improving land, but the latter is absolutely necessary because land is finite. Its taxation can both decrease inequality by taking out land values as a source of wealth concentration while discouraging land speculators, making land more available for use and helping the economy. This alongside giving good revenue to reduce taxes on what people make.

But, instead of focusing on shifting the property tax towards fully returning land values to society, states want to abolish or at the least neuter it for the benefit of landowners. The end result is that the burden of taxation is shifted on to work and business while landowners are free to profit from denying everyone else a finite resource, which leads to problems like the housing crisis that kick up the barriers of entry for the young and poor who work to keep the state alive. It’s been shown time and time again, but the lesson is still lost across political lines.

A new online multiplayer game called Prosperity officially opened to the public on June 15, 2026, entering an already crowded digital gaming landscape with an unusually explicit ambition: to make economic philosophy playable.

The browser-based title reframes property competition through the lens of Georgist economics, drawing direct inspiration from the early 20th-century board game The Landlord’s Game and its inventor Lizzie Magie, as well as the political-economic writings of Henry George.

The game was created by Evan Atlas, a New Paltz, New York–born philosopher, writer, entrepreneur, and game designer. Born in 1991, Atlas is the son of author Nava Atlas and artist Harry Chaim Tabak. He is the author of three books and publisher of the Mapping with Atlas Substack, where he explores subjects ranging from game theory and ethics to psychology, complex systems, metamodernism, personal development, and spiritual growth. Those interests converge in Prosperity, a project that combines strategy gaming, economic education, and civic participation.

Atlas describes the project as both a game and a “living model” of competing economic systems.

“The little worlds we call games have the power to reshape the big world we call Earth,” he writes in the project’s accompanying materials.

From “The Landlord’s Game” to Digital Revival

Prosperity explicitly positions itself as a modern reimagining of Magie’s original design, which was intended to demonstrate the social consequences of land monopolization and economic rent.

Magie’s game, created in the early 1900s, is widely regarded by historians as a precursor to Monopoly, though its underlying intent was sharply different: rather than celebrating monopolistic accumulation, it was designed to critique it.

Atlas leans heavily into that historical tension, framing Prosperity as a kind of “restoration” of suppressed game design ideas. In press materials, he argues that Magie’s original economic vision was diluted when her work was later eclipsed by Monopoly.

Two Economic Systems in One Game

At the core of Prosperity is a dual-rule structure that allows players to experience two different economic regimes within a single match.

The first phase, called the “Hoarder Era,” resembles traditional property acquisition games: players compete to purchase land, collect rents, and build wealth through ownership.

Midway through gameplay, however, players vote on whether to transition into what Atlas calls the “Prosperity Era.” In this system, land rents are redirected into a shared public treasury and redistributed equally among players, while buildings and improvements remain privately owned.

The shift is intended to model Georgist ideas about economic rent—specifically the argument that land value is socially generated and should be returned to the community rather than concentrated among owners.

Real-World Incentives and the “Prosperity Pool”

Beyond gameplay, Prosperity also incorporates a charitable funding mechanism tied to paid play. Entry fees from premium versions are pooled monthly and distributed to a selected nonprofit organization, primarily in New York’s Hudson Valley region.

Players participate in selecting beneficiaries through a weighted voting system based on engagement and in-game performance. Atlas describes this as an attempt to connect “game outcomes, civic participation, and real-world resource distribution.”

The project website, which launched alongside the game, describes the mechanism as a “local pilot program” with potential for expansion.

Game Design as Economic Argument

While Prosperity functions as a competitive multiplayer experience, its structure is also explicitly didactic. Players choose avatars representing historical advocates of land value taxation, and in-game systems dynamically adjust land rents based on collective development across the board—an attempt to simulate the Georgist claim that land value is socially produced.

The game also includes cooperative spaces such as parks and “sanctuaries” that reward non-zero-sum outcomes, as well as systems designed to prevent early elimination, ensuring that players remain engaged even after falling behind.

Atlas frames these mechanics as responses to what he calls “race-to-the-bottom dynamics” in both games and real economies.

A Philosophical Throughline

The project situates itself within a broader intellectual tradition stretching from Henry George’s 19th-century critique of inequality to modern debates about housing, taxation, and land use.

By foregrounding Lizzie Magie’s original intent, Prosperity also joins a growing cultural reassessment of early economic board games and their influence on popular understandings of capitalism.

For Atlas, however, the goal is not historical correction alone, but practical experimentation.

Launch and Early Reception

Since its public release on June 15, Prosperity has drawn attention in niche gaming and economics communities, particularly among players interested in simulation games with explicit ideological systems.

Early users have highlighted its hybrid structure (part strategy game, part civic experiment) as both its most distinctive feature and its most controversial one, raising questions about whether games can meaningfully simulate real-world policy tradeoffs.

Still, the project’s framing is clear: Prosperity is not just a game about winning wealth, but about redefining how wealth itself is created, distributed, and understood.

As Atlas puts it in his closing statement:

“The future is already being prototyped in systems we play every day. This is just one attempt to make those systems visible.”

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By Jimbo

A common group of questions I've seen Georgists get asked on the internet relates to how Henry George's ideas would impact the use of nature. Some question if a land value tax would encourage sprawl and the development of every parcel under the sun, others if it would entail the destruction of public parks. The general fear is that by taxing nature, we'll only encourage its destruction instead of enacting its preservation.

But when we look at how nature's use and abuse is factored into our current economic structure, we can actually derive the opposite. The reason why nature can be used and abused so heavily in our current economic structure is because the cost of taking and abusing nature, a cost placed on the rest of society, isn't factored so heavily against those who cause it. People can get wealth from taking or outright destroying nature without paying the cost of excluding everyone from those finite resources.

What are some good examples? Let’s start with the basic standard, land.

Land Speculation Wastes Parcels

In one of our previous articles explaining why we must end private economic rents in finite assets, we briefly mentioned land speculators who get their wealth by buying up parcels, not to use them, but to sit on them and wait for their price to rise before cashing in on the increased land value. This hurts the economy of course, what should’ve been productive investment is instead diverted into the simple withholding of a finite resource.

But the effects run deeper than just simply worsening the economy, land speculators holding prime parcels off the market forces prospective land users to go to plots that are still available. What results is a tremendous amount of land waste, where parcels in the middle of urban cores that could otherwise be used to house hundreds of people or scores of businesses instead of a barren lot fit only for parking cars.

What happens when our most valuable parcels can’t be used? Prospective users are forced to go to land that isn’t locked up in a speculator’s clutches, and more land goes to waste than is needed. When this rewarding of land speculation is combined with actively taxing and punishing those who use the land through taxing buildings and labor, sprawl ends up being massively increased as the land market is hugely hampered.

Strong evidence showing how Henry George’s ideas can reverse these sprawl-oriented trends can be found in those Pennsylvanian cities which have shifted their property tax burden off buildings and towards the land. A study in the article “Can the land tax help curb urban sprawl? Evidence from growth patterns in Pennsylvania” by Spencer Banzhaf and Nathan Lavery show this well, as stated in their conclusion:

The split-rate tax is a long-advocated tool that should lead to greater economic efficiency. Our results indicate that it should also lead to “smarter” growth patterns. We find that capital-land ratios increase in those areas with split-rate taxes and higher land-structure tax ratios. Moreover, the dwelling size effect appears to be modest, so that most of this increased capital implies greater density for the city. Adopting the split-rate tax results in a 4–5% point increase per decade in the growth of the density of housing units, for the first two decades.

This increased density brought by even the small Georgist shift of turning property taxes into pure land value taxes protects nature by reducing the amount of land and nature cities must use to provide ample living space to their residents. Less sprawl from cities means more nature left over on the outskirts that is spared from destruction.

This idea of land efficiency and discouraging waste can also be applied to rural areas, where farmland speculation is rampant. Not only do farmland speculators waste the very parcels we need to grow the basic building block of human survival, food, they price out actual working farmers in the process, kicking up the barriers of entry. More speculation with land and less work put into it means far more land left barren and far more land used than necessary. As it is with urban land, tax the finite rural land people take to protect it from this poor treatment, and more of it will be preserved while at least helping lower prices from being sky high.

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Tax the Drying of the Earth

Water is another good example of this idea in practice. A major ecological problem facing countries like the United States is the waste of water resources, and this can be pinpointed to our water policies. As explained by Fred Foldvary in his article “Water Creates Rent“:

Much of the water rights in the American West originate in “prior appropriation,” meaning first come, first served, forever. Some 80 percent of the West’s water goes to agriculture, because the farmers were here first. To keep their water rights, farmers need to use up the water, and that creates waste rather than wise use.

We don’t encourage our water resources to be used efficiently for the sake of protecting what is essentially the lifeblood of this planet and the human species because the cost of taking that water is lost on those who do the taking, and it is this waste Foldvary mentions which is starting to incite fear into those who rely on water sources in danger of running dry, like the Colorado River.

Just like land then, the Georgist idea of taxing water, as outlined by Georgist economist Mason Gaffney, is a much-needed remedy to the loss of this finite bit of the natural world. It can simultaneously raise revenue to be used for public services while encouraging keeping water conserved.

There is also the question of the water market, especially when it comes to trading rights. Again, just like land, these rights should be treated as tokens to finite natural resources, and in line with their value should be fully recouped by governments to prevent any possibility of speculation in what should be a public resource. Do that, and water waste can be minimized while making money for public goods.

Clear Cut Pollution

A close corollary of classical Georgist ideas to tax the taking of nature are taxes on pollution. Indeed, many Georgists have come to accept Pigouvian taxes on negative externalities (at least environmentally) as a part of the Georgist platform while providing strong explanations for doing so.

While they’re the most clear-cut example, this idea doesn’t have to be limited to just carbon taxes but can be expanded to account for all sorts of pollution. As explained in “The Green Tax Shift” by the aforementioned Fred Foldvary:

Simply put, a green tax is a levy on pollution. It goes further than a carbon tax to levy a charge on all harmful emissions in proportion to the damage they cause, ideally making polluters pay for the full social cost of their emissions.
…
Some economists and policy makers have claimed that the cost of investing in
emission-reducing technology and production methods needs to discount the effect on future generations, since wealth today is worth more to us than wealth in the future.

Others dispute such discounting as not valid, saying we have no moral right to declare future lives as less valuable than present-day lives. The green tax shift would make the question of social discounting moot, as pollution charges would reduce present-day emissions and benefit those living today as well as those living in the future.

There are many ways to justify taxes on pollution from the Georgist perspective. Be it the finite atmospheric carbon budget being overloaded with emissions, or just the idea that because the natural world is finite, any destruction of it is a damage that must be recompensed; just the same as if fencing it off for personal use.

Whatever the reason, taxes on pollution represent the most direct way nature can be protected in a Georgist system, and similar to water and land can encourage commerce to take on more sustainable alternatives if it means reducing some of the financial burden of using up the planet’s resources in a way that’s unsustainable.

All Nature is Included

Now that we have a basic idea for how Georgist taxation can directly reduce the misuse and abuse of finite natural resources, we can draw a general conclusion of what Georgism exactly seeks to achieve by taxing nature. In a previous article we covered that ending private rents in finite assets can both reduce inequality while growing the economy. That idea can be expanded upon by also acknowledging that recompensing the value of nature can keep it from being wasted and overused, as we see in examples like land and its speculative waste.

There’s reason to believe that this idea could be applied to all natural resources, for the same reason Henry George included all of what nature provides in his original definition for economic “land”. Rent-seekers who hold finite natural opportunities out of use make society use more nature than needed, and so Georgism naturally corrects this through taxation.

This isn’t to say Georgism would fully stop the destruction of nature, but it would slow it down heavily as the cost of its destruction would finally be felt by those who carry it out, not just those who are on the receiving end of losing our natural world. Georgism has always been a green ideology, one that seeks to reconcile the efficient and just distribution of goods and services with the efficient and just use of our ecology.

To close, I would like to quote an excerpt from a writing by the late and great Georgist Bill Batt, which summarizes this idea beautifully:

The consequences of collecting economic rent are to increase prospects for achieving sustainable development. This is because fiscal instruments constrain the use of natural resources more than do either CAC approaches or fiscal measures inspired by neoclassical approaches. Collecting full royalties by competitive auction for nature’s harvests reverses the exploitation of nature that presently obtains. Establishing proper prices for such materials and services would likely reduce their appropriation. All this enhances efficiency and productivity in ways that are consistent with sustainable
economics, and gives recognition and space to elements of the ecosystem so that it is less threatened with extinction and exhaustion.

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A new report modeling a property tax building exemption in Spokane rebalances incentives toward community goals, encouraging homebuilding and discouraging in-city vacant land speculation.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published on June 3rd, 2026, by the Sightline Institute at sightline.org.

Takeaways

• Washington’s property tax system quietly rewards landowners who sit on vacant lots in our cities, while penalizing investment in the new homes, shops, and jobs that create real community value. The fix for this counterproductive dynamic is a land value tax that lowers the tax on buildings and raises it on land.

• A new report from the Center for Land Economics proposes a policy that would exempt building value from property tax to create a revenue-neutral tax shift from buildings to land, replicating a land value tax while adhering to Washington state’s tax rules.

• The report models this approach in the city of Spokane, finding that it would encourage the in-city homebuilding that cities need to curb prices, and discourage vacant lots and land speculation; it would flip the incentive structure without touching the city’s bottom line.

• Most homeowners wouldn’t see much change in their tax bill at all, while the shift would be progressive in lower-income and more racially diverse neighborhoods, where homeowners would see larger tax reductions.

• By granting this authority through the Vibrant Cities Act, the Washington legislature would empower cities to use their own tax code to cool land speculation, spur homebuilding, and return community-created land value back to the public.

In communities across the state, Washingtonians are reeling from high home prices and rents caused by the state’s severe shortage of homes. In cities and towns, big and small, from Bellingham to Walla Walla, people need more affordable home choices. At the same time, thousands of acres of vacant and underused lots pervade many of our urban neighborhoods, even in otherwise dynamic downtowns.

One big reason for this disconnect? The tax structure. Under North America’s standard property tax system, the owner of a vacant lot is taxed only a fraction of what’s paid by their neighbor who owns a productive building on a similar lot. The tax system rewards speculation on underutilized land, while discouraging investment in the new homes, shops, and offices that generate community vitality.

A fix for this dysfunctional state of affairs is known as a land value tax. Translation: tax the land more and the buildings less.

The problem is that, while a land value tax may be conceptually simple, it’s also fraught, both politically and legally. Politically, because, well, it’s taxes. And legally, Washington state has a particularly formidable barrier: the state constitution prohibits taxing buildings and land at different rates.

Undeterred, local electeds in Spokane who recognized the benefits a land value tax could bring to their city have for the past year been cooking up an alternative that has the same effect but wouldn’t run afoul of Washington’s constitution. Instead of reducing the tax rate on buildings, it would exempt assessed building value from taxation. And it would raise the overall tax rate to compensate so that the total tax collected wouldn’t change. The result: a revenue-neutral shift of property taxes off of buildings and onto land.

Could it work in the real world? A new report from the Center for Land Economics focused on the City of Spokane says yes, absolutely. Check it out for all the weedy details. Here’s the short version.

A building exemption in Spokane would do the trick

The report does the math on Spokane’s tax database of every parcel in the city. To start, one thing it finds is that if the full value of all buildings were exempted, to keep things revenue-neutral, the property tax rate would have to be raised higher than Washington’s legal limits. The solution is a partial exemption, through either a flat amount, a percentage, or a combination of both. To maximize the tax shift while staying legal, the modeling exempts $100,000 plus 75 percent of the building’s remaining value for all of Spokane’s levies except one, which had to be dialed back to $40,000 plus 20 percent.

This formula yields the key outcome you’d expect from a land value tax: for parcels that are vacant or have dilapidated buildings on them, the property tax bill goes up a lot, perhaps doubling. Instead of passively gaining from rising value thanks to investments made by the community in the surrounding area, owners holding that land get a new signal: speculating now comes with a higher cost. And that makes them more inclined to invest in building something productive on their lot or sell it to someone else who will. Tah-dah! Empty lots become homes or businesses.

Other findings:

• For most owners of single-detached houses, it’s a wash: the tax increase on their land is offset, more or less, by the tax reduction on their house—the median house in Spokane even sees a 4 percent decrease.

• The scheme is progressive in two ways: it yields greater tax reductions to homeowners in census tracts that either have lower incomes, or higher racial diversity. The flat part of the exemption bolsters these benefits because it gives a proportionally larger exemption to lower-value homes.

• Commercial and industrial properties tend to pay slightly more tax, with median increases of 0.7 percent and 2.4 percent, respectively.

• Properties with higher-value structures, such as apartment buildings, get larger tax cuts: 14 percent for Spokane’s median multifamily building with five or more homes. Importantly, this effect also sparks new homebuilding. Property tax is an operating expense for buildings, and the lower that expense, the easier it becomes for proposed housing to pencil. That means more homes get built, helping to keep rents and prices under control for everyone.

State legislation could give every Washington city a new option for boosting homes and local economic development

Last year, Spokane’s local electeds teamed up with policy wonks at the Center for Land Economics and Sightline Institute, and began working with Representative Natasha Hill (D-Spokane) to develop legislation called the Vibrant Cities Act. It would grant Washington cities authority to implement the building exemption tax shift model. Unfortunately, the bill was not sufficiently developed to run in the 2026 session. Work will continue on fine-tuning the policy and building a coalition in anticipation of a 2027 bill.

A land value tax is good policy in any economic climate. But it’s especially opportune today, when high interest rates and bloated costs for materials and labor have stymied homebuilding almost everywhere. Shifting taxes from buildings to land is something Washington cities could do, at virtually zero cost, to counteract the slump. In fact, the catalyzed new construction, new local business opportunities, and ongoing economic activity it would create could generate a lasting net gain in total city tax revenue.

On top of all that, there’s one more benefit that may be the best reason of all to love land value taxes. The value of a piece of land is largely determined by what’s around it. In cities, that value lives in the nearby buildings and businesses and public facilities that the community as a whole creates. It’s the owner of your favorite new neighborhood pizza shop, the builder eager to meet the local need for starter homes, or a new city-funded pocket park. As these investments help cities prosper, the price of land goes up even for landowners who keep their lots vacant and contribute nothing to that prosperity.

In short, taxing land pays dividends on community-created value—and reinvests it right back into that very community to fund shared public benefits. That’s about as fair as any tax can be!

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the Jimbo’s Geonomics opinion column series on thedailyrenter.com on May 25, 2026

Author’s Disclaimer: To avoid any confusion, the term rent in the title refers to economic rent, the returns to finite assets. It does not mean the contract rent gotten from leasing out any asset to another person.

When it comes to the market economy, there exists a fundamental distinction between the goods and services, be it as laborers or as investors in capital, which people make, and the finite assets, most especially land, which people take. The free market is predicated on the idea that any increase in demand and the price paid for a good or a service should be matched by an increase in the supply of that good or service, both to reduce prices and make said good or service more abundant. Pursuant to this idea is the belief that new competition should be able to come into a specific market and reduce the power of incumbent producers, preventing them from accumulating wealth while not meeting the demands of society.

But this core idea drives itself into a ditch when it comes to those things which are finite, things which humans cannot produce more of regardless of how scarce and sorely needed they become, and the unearned income they bring in to their owners. The early thinkers of free market-oriented Liberalism like Adam Smith recognized this core principle as far back as the late 18th century, yet instead of heeding their warnings we have instead been treating the finite things of value in this world as a core economic investment. The result has been a myriad of economic failures, extremely unequal outcomes, and an outright misuse and abuse of nature’s bounty, all because we forgot this fundamental distinction in our market economy.

Economic Rent Comes in Many Forms

Before we cover how dealing with economic rents can reconcile equity and efficiency, we first need to cover the various forms in which it comes. There are various sources, so to simplify here is a bulleted list of them listed under special categories (taken from these sources: Peter Smith Rewilding and Liberal Currents):

• Natural resources:

  • Land

  • Subsoil resource deposits (e.g. minerals and oil)

  • Water rights

  • The electromagnetic spectrum

  • Orbital slots in space

  • Timber rights on forested land

  • Fishing rights

  • Rights-of-way (more on this in the natural monopolies section)

• Legal privileges:

  • Patents (medicines, software, industrial designs)

  • Copyrights (software, like DMCA section 1201, and broader media)

  • Limited occupational licenses, especially when reinforced by associated professional organizations (e.g. medical licenses and the AMA)

  • Limited government franchise rights (e.g. taxi medallions)

• Natural monopolies:

  • Utilities (e.g. electricity, water, and gas services, which all rely on aforementioned rights-of-way)

  • Transportation networks like rail (which again rely on rights-of-way to build lines)

  • More recently, network effects in data-oriented platforms, which allows those who harness it to constantly accumulate and strengthen their market power and value as their user base grows. Being involved in the world of technology, these network effect moats are also protected and widened by patents and copyrights.

• Finally, outright monopolies-of-scale, as described by Henry George himself

By having the special power of being able to control these finite assets, be it a particular plot of land or the privilege of being at the top of a naturally monopolistic industry, owners can charge extra out of society without needing to fear new competitors coming in to undercut them. Nobody can fold the Earth over itself to make a second Manhattan or any more beyond it, which is why Manhattan land in 2014 was worth about the same as all of Canada’s GDP in 2014. Granted, Manhattan is one of the great economic hubs of the World; but still that value which accrues to landowners, who do not need to do any work and investment to capture the economic rent of land, is value wasted in paying for a resource whose supply we can’t increase.

Market Failure

It’s here where the economic struggles begin with putting our economic eggs into the basket of finite assets, and land serves as the perfect example. As land in a particular location grows more valuable with the growth of the community and investment around it, so too does the incentive to buy it, sit on it, and wait for its price to rise. This practice, called land speculation, only worsens the issue as, instead of using our most necessary finite resource efficiently and wisely, speculators instead hold land bare while actual prospective users are forced to worse parcels with fewer prospects. Add too the loss of parcels on the market and the increase in the scarcity and price of land, all self-inflicted by our poor public policies, and the cost of land crushes the laborers and productive (not extractive) investors who actually keep the economy afloat.

This also begs the question, to what extent do non-land sources of economic rent drive up the cost of production in the same way land does? How much in the realm of making and giving for each other’s benefit do we lose because restricted medical licenses drive up the scarcity of doctors and healthcare, or because speculators hold out oil deposits and make us use more nature for less return, or because natural monopolies can exercise their inherently unbreakable market power against the people and businesses who rely on them? The social and economic cost of rent-seeking in finite privileges that no new market entrant can compete with is enormous, and land is at the center of it all. This is perhaps best emphasized in the article “Henry George, land speculation, and economic growth and transformation” by Joseph Stiglitz and Tomohiro Hirano:

What is clear, however, is that land speculation (or speculation on any non-produced asset) will detract from productive investment, and that that in turn will have an impact on growth. Policy can mitigate these effects, but financial and monetary policies, designed to stabilize the economy and enhance growth, that do not take into account impacts on the extent of land speculation, may well go awry.

...

But it is not only land rents that divert savings from productive investments that might both deepen capital and facilitate growth-enhancing structural transformation—the capitalized value of monopoly and oligopoly rents may have similar effects. Thus, economic policies that curb rents, in all forms, may be one of the most important tools for promoting the accumulation of productive capital, structural transformation, and economic growth.

Treating finite assets as an investment, resources and privileges all, is a direct wealth transfer from productive workers and businesses to extractive owners, especially our most monopolistic/oligopolistic corporate giants. We can not call a market free while it still falls victim to the effects of monopoly, which are backed by extracting unearned income in those things we can not produce more of.

The Haves vs. The Have-Nots

This element of monopoly, of appropriation and spoilation will, when we come to analyze them, be found largely to account for all great fortunes...

• Henry George, Social Problems, 1883 (link to excerpt)

The privilege of being able to own a thing nobody can reproduce doesn’t just allow extraction without giving anything in return, it also allows those who have finite privileges to directly enrich themselves off making those who rely on their privilege poorer. As the price of land grows in our most valuable urban cities, the price the landless must pay rises too, and so the landowner can accumulate and collect more wealth by requiring a heavier price out of the landless. An example of this two-tier society can be seen in the fact that, on average, landed homeowners have a net worth 43 times that of landless renters. While housing consists of producible housing alongside finite land, the effect of land’s limited nature as a source of the housing crisis can not be understated. This is also before accounting for large-scale landowners and real estate companies that own vast swathes of parcels, be they rural, suburban, or urban.

The problem only gets more extreme when we add on other finite assets too. Assets like mineral deposits, pharmaceutical patents, software copyrights, or a naturally monopolistic business only widen the divide between persons and businesses who own (or have a stake) in their control and those who have to pay the toll they create. Alongside this is the growth in market power a business grants itself being able to insulate from competitors, as well as the problem that our financial system and its assets are heavily tied in to the growth in the value of the finite, especially land; a situation author Mike Bird refers to as The Land Trap.

Of course, this isn’t to say that the only way to get rich is by owning a finite asset, actual productive investment can lead to a vast sum of wealth as well, but it is almost certain that a great deal of our current economic inequality can be pointed back to them. While there isn’t a comprehensive modern study on the effects of all private rents from finite assets on inequality, there is historical evidence that it plays an incredibly important role in explaining inequality. In 1893, at the height of the original Georgist movement’s popularity, Georgist economist John R. Commons wrote the following in an excerpt from his book, The Distribution of Wealth (modified for better reading):

The prime importance of monopoly privileges in the distribution of wealth is well shown by the results of the investigation of the New York Tribune in its efforts to ascertain the sources of the fortunes of the millionnaires [sic] of the United States. That investigation was undertaken to show that the system of protection has not been the main cause for monopolies and great fortunes. The investigation amply demonstrates this proposition. Of the 4047 millionnaires reported, only 1125, or 28%, obtained their fortunes in protected industries. The following partly estimated summaries are given, based on the Tribune report. They show that about 78% of the fortunes were derived from permanent monopoly privileges, and only 21.4% from competitive industries unaided by natural and artificial monopolies. Yet there can be no question that if this 21.4 % were fully analysed, it would appear that they were not due solely to personal abilities unaided by these permanent monopoly privileges. They were mostly obtained from manufactures, and five sixths of the manufactures of the country are based on patents. Besides, fortunate investments in real estate, stocks, etc., have often contributed to fortunes where they do not appear prominently.

Commons’ last line specifically ties back into the question of how hidden finite assets are among broader financial investments. Real estate does involve produced buildings but also hides the effect of finite land, stocks as representations of value can point to produced capital but can also point to finite assets too. Finding that distinction between production and finitude within these instruments for investment is a topic that needs more care and attention.

Reconciliation

Our current system of taxation fails to make the distinction between that which people produce and that which is finite since reproduction is impossible. Income taxes, sales taxes, the building portion of property taxes (not that which falls on the land), and many of the other taxes we levy all fall on production, directly discouraging it. Worse yet, some of these taxes raise inequality while hampering the productive economy, a double poison.

Meanwhile, the economic rents which accumulate to finite assets are allowed to go to private owners mostly unchecked by the public. There are some locations which do a better job collecting their land values (e.g. Singapore’s methods of land value capture and the split-rate property tax cities of Pennsylvania), but in most locations the return of the value of the finite to the public is little to none.

A recent topic of discussion in economic circles has been the viability of a constant wealth tax above a certain cap as a way to reduce inequality. But similar to the current taxes mentioned in the previous section, a common criticism has been that taxing all wealth can discourage production by targeting the net worth of those who invest in actual productive capital, lowering its supply. It’s a continuation of the fear that there’s a tradeoff between growth and equity.

But what this exercise in understanding private economic rents in finite assets shows us is that we don’t have to trade off growth for equity or vice versa. Private wealth extraction in finite assets already is that feared double poison of inefficiency and inequity seeping throughout our economy. But while this poison may be a killer when left unchecked, it also gives us an obvious antidote, one which can return us that efficiency and equity we’ve long desired. It can perhaps be summarized in a single line:

Don’t tax the value of the goods and services people make, return (or dismantle) the value of the finite assets people take

It is simple, and it likely isn’t the end-all be-all to all economic problems, but it is the best platform to begin building our economy towards being its absolute best.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published on thedailyrenter.com on September 4, 2025

The most common and least controversial opinion that people tend to hold when it comes to taxes is that the tax code should be made simpler and the filing process should be free or at least very cheap.

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Companies like TurboTax have lobbied for decades, to many Americans’ dismays, for the US government to NOT offer free tax filing services, thus keeping their business model alive through sheer rent seeking rather than competitive pricing or service innovation.

Why are taxes so complicated to begin with that it requires an entire industry to help people navigate? It’s because we have a multi-tax rather than a Single Tax System.

The Multi-Tax System

In the United States today, the tax system is fragmented across dozens of overlapping levies on both producers and consumers. Workers and small business owners are squeezed from multiple angles:

• Income taxes at the federal, state, and sometimes local levels take a share of wages and salaries before people ever see their paycheck.

• Payroll taxes (for Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance) further carve out a mandatory portion of earned income.

• Sales taxes fall on nearly every retail purchase, inflating the everyday cost of living.

• Excise taxes target specific goods like gasoline, alcohol, and cigarettes, often disproportionately burdening the working class.

• Tariffs and import duties increase the price of foreign goods, creating hidden taxes on consumers.

• Corporate taxes are passed on indirectly through higher prices or lower wages.

This maze of taxes on both sides of the economy (production and consumption) creates what amounts to a double tax system when we zoom out. On one side, public taxes directly penalize the creation and exchange of goods and services. On the other, private “taxes” from rent-seeking entities (landlords, monopolists, patent holders, and other unearned income claimants) are left untaxed. The result is that workers and consumers are hit twice: once by government taxes, and again by private rent extractions that drive up the cost of housing, healthcare, energy, etc.

Property taxes deserve special attention because, unlike other taxes, they contain within them the seed of a rational system: a tax on land value. When levied on land itself rather than on the buildings and improvements atop it, property taxes discourage speculation and channel community-created value back into the public treasury.

Unfortunately, property taxes in the U.S. are usually applied to both land and improvements, which penalizes construction and maintenance. Large landowners, who stand to benefit the most from untaxed land rents, have pushed for constitutional limits or outright abolition of property taxes in states like Florida and Texas.

What they don’t tell voters is that these “cuts” almost always come paired with increases in income, sales, or gas taxes that hit workers and consumers instead. A better model, pioneered in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, is the split-rate property tax, which taxes land at a higher rate while reducing or eliminating taxes on buildings, aligning with the Georgist principle that unearned rent is the proper source of public revenue.

Economist Mason Gaffney described this interaction through his concept of ATCOR (All Taxes Come Out of Rent). His insight was that, in the end, every tax (whether on wages, sales, or capital) reduces the maximum rent landlords and monopolists can extract. Yet rent seekers prefer these taxes, because they shift the burden onto workers and consumers while keeping land and monopoly gains officially untaxed.

The result is a kind of privatized “double taxation”: the state collects from the workers and small capital owners who do the most producing and consuming, while landlords and monopolists are free to raise prices and rents.

Rent-seekers will always push for this arrangement, but not so far that it impoverishes their tenants, workers, or customers, since those “cash cows” are the ultimate source of their unearned income. The Henry George Theorem, first formalized by Joseph Stiglitz, provides the inverse perspective to ATCOR: at efficient city size, the sum of land rents is just sufficient to fund the optimal level of local public goods. Taken together, Gaffney and Stiglitz show two sides of the same coin: either you tax production, which shrinks the rent fund, or you collect rent directly, which makes other taxes unnecessary.

This sets the stage for the solution: the revival of the Single Tax Movement, which sought to simplify the code, eliminate distortions, and collapse these many taxes into one efficient levy on land rent and anticompetitive monopoly profits.

Bringing Back the Single Tax Movement

The idea of a Single Tax is not new. In the late 19th century, Henry George galvanized millions with his proposal to abolish nearly all taxes and replace them with a single levy on land rent. George argued that land, unlike labor and capital, is not produced by human effort. Its value comes from nature itself and from the community’s growth and investment. Because no individual created land, no individual has the moral right to claim its increase in value as private profit. That increase, he said, belongs to the community.

The Single Tax movement spread across the world, influencing policies from Australia to Denmark and inspiring generations of reformers. While the movement lost momentum in the United States during the 20th century with the invention of the automobile kicking the land crisis can further down the road, its logic has never lost relevance. Today’s debates about housing shortages, inequality, and tax reform echo the very problems George identified in Progress and Poverty (1879).

A modern Single Tax approach would mean:

• Shifting the tax base off of production and consumption: so workers keep their wages, entrepreneurs keep their profits, and consumers are not penalized for spending.

• Taxing land rent and monopoly privileges directly: capturing the unearned income that accrues to landlords, resource owners, and holders of artificial monopolies like intellectual property hoards.

• Simplifying the tax code drastically: collapsing dozens of overlapping taxes into a straightforward system that cannot be gamed by lobbyists or buried in loopholes.

This is not just a matter of fairness; it is a matter of efficiency. When we tax productive activity, we discourage it. When we tax unearned rent, we free up the economy to grow while ensuring that the benefits of growth are shared. The Henry George Theorem shows that land rent, if collected properly, is sufficient to fund local public goods. Gaffney’s ATCOR shows that if we fail to collect rent, other taxes eat into it anyway, but in the most damaging and roundabout way possible.

In short, the Georgist Land Value Tax and other taxes on the non-reproducible assets of rent seekers transforms what is now a schizophrenic double-tax system into a unified, rational system that funds society from its natural revenue source. The two become one.

Conclusion

Americans are right to demand a simpler, fairer tax code. They are right to be frustrated that companies like TurboTax profit from complexity, while workers and consumers are left to shoulder the burden. But the problem is deeper than tax filing software: it is the very structure of our multi-tax system.

If we are serious about reform, we must move beyond tinkering at the margins and revisit the bold solution Henry George put forward more than a century ago. A Single Tax on land rent and monopoly privileges would not only simplify our tax code, but also liberate labor and capital, lower the cost of living, and ensure that the wealth created by the community returns to the community.

The choice before us is clear: continue propping up a labyrinth of taxes that punish production and reward rent-seeking or embrace a system that aligns justice with efficiency. The Single Tax is not a relic of the past, it is the blueprint for a more prosperous, more equitable future.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published on thedailyrenter.com on August 31, 2025

Three days, that’s not just how long it takes for a family to make a potato salad, it’s also how long a human body can go without drinking water before it begins to fail and die. Water is a necessity of life that we get primarily by drawing it from its sources: rivers, aquifers, lakes, and more.

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In line with the high demand for the water provided by nature, there is an inherent scarcity that gives natural water sources their value. Much like other natural resources, especially the rights to the land which store them, water rights to use a particular source of it are non-reproducible. To collect a right to use a specific water source is to automatically exclude the rest of society from said source without any chance of them duplicating what has been lost.

Peel back the layers behind the water rights industry and it will be seen that vast robberies of society’s deserved keepsake are carried forward in the private profits of water rights and those who invest in them.

To understand the solution to the water problem, we need to do a deep dive on its current ailments. They range from how we pay for its current use, to its discussion in investment circles as the next big thing.

The Liquid Frontier

Rights to use particular sources of water are becoming a rising frontier for rent-seeking off the exclusive ownership of nature.

But this is no surprise. Just like land, water is a natural resource whose ability to extract wealth from potential users has become a valuable and lucrative tool to take unearned increments that should belong to the common purse. The potential is so large that water rights have even been called the Next Big Investment. Water is expected to take the titanic title of being a trillion-dollar asset.

This exists due to several reasons, the necessity of water for life and its resulting demand is the strongest fuel for the fire by far, but its increasing scarcity due to climate change and overuse has added an extra fuel to its dire fire.

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In our current system, we aren’t accounting for this correctly. Per the article, “Water Creates Rent”, by Georgist economist Fred Foldvary:

“Much of the water rights in the American West originate in “prior appropriation,” meaning first come, first served, forever. Some 80 percent of the West’s water goes to agriculture, because the farmers were here first. To keep their water rights, farmers need to use up the water, and that creates waste rather than wise use.”

Water sources should be seen as the property of the people. Yet, with our current choices in public policy, not only do we actively allow this bit of nature to be locked away in exclusive rights to extract, we actively incentivize its misuse with over-extraction.

This system leaves the cost of taking scarce water out of the world unaccounted for, tremendous misuse abounds and our Earth is mistreated. In turn, current owners of water rights benefit while the rest of society, and future generations, suffer.

While it is more than likely that the families of the future will feel the worst of our folly with water, we pay hefty dividends for water misuse currently, and quite literally. Not only do we have “use it or lose it” laws, we actively pay landowners to dry up their land, like in the Colorado River.

Subsidies to industries that extract water, like exclusive aid to mega farms, run in the billions. There is a monopolistic edge to these subsidies, as they are often non-reproducible by smaller competitors or newcomers to the industries that major recipients currently dominate.

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But this point goes deeper, the very tax money taken out of the hands of those who work and those who invest in capital is currently siphoned away to monopolists of a common necessity we can’t create more of. And as is the trend, the beneficiaries of monopoly privileges mistreat the society that suffers under their reign; the Colorado River being just another unfortunate example.

Clearly, this entire system demands reform for the sake of society’s survival. Water use should be based on the prices it’ll be bid for on the market, similar to some other natural resources. But that’s only the first step; a market for water runs afoul of the problem mentioned before: owners of water rights can extract rents from those who need to hydrate, because water, just like all of nature, is finite and non-reproducible.

The case of water is quite analogous to the case of oil, with battles over exclusive rights to it amidst a boom in its value. The same problems of tremendous unearned profits and severe corruption and misuse that were seen when we covered subsoil oil and mineral deposits may potentially be seen in the ever-rolling water boom.

So, just like with oil, the water rights problem requires a Georgist solution that can combine efficiency with equality. Thankfully for us, that solution is quite a familiar one.

How to Compensate for Drying the Planet

To ensure that our scarce sources of water are used responsibly and with care and caution of waste, we must apply the answer to the oil problem to the water problem. Water resources can be kept as personal rights with a market attached to the parts of its production: extraction, preparation, and selling it off for consumption. But the catch is this: to take from the common stock of our unifying lifeline is to demand and require compensation to all excluded.

The answer then, is to tax the value of water rights themselves (not the work or investment that goes into using that right). This can be done either annually as an attached part of the right or at the time of extraction with a severance tax. Much like oil, requiring water rights owners to compensate for their exclusive privilege would spur efficiency by making them more aware of their water’s scarcity, while enhancing equality by denying them the power to leverage that right as a mere wealth-taking tool. Taking the extractive value of water rights out of their owners’ hands for the benefit of each individual in the community forms a fundamental part of Georgist thought, and socially necessary reform in general.

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There is perhaps no better explanation of the benefits of taxing water resources and their respective rights than Mason Gaffney. From his aptly titled “The Taxable Surplus in Water Resources”:

“Five major problems of the water economy may be ameliorated by imposing a package of severance and other taxes on water withdrawals and power drops. This would: 1) Spur holders of surplus water to sell; 2) Foster conservation; 3) Convert water from a sink to a source of state funds; 4) Offset the concentrated possession of water; 5) Integrate the economies of ground and surface water. A severance of net proceeds tax can be viewed as a price charged by the owner of water (the state) for using its property.”

Many distortions exist owing to the severance and depletion of water resources not being accounted for monetarily by its controllers. Inefficiencies and inequalities prosper as our current system prefers to tax the rewards of creating and trading goods and services while failing to charge rent for controlling, or depleting, our non-reproducible Earth.

The answer is clear, if anyone wants to take the lifeblood of the planet for their own personal use, they must only be able to profit off the production and trade of that water into something tangible and usable by the populace. The returns of being able to own and extract water sources under monopolistic extraction rights must be paid forward to society, not the reverse.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published on thedailyrenter.com on August 18, 2025

“It is at once evident, that rent is the effect of a monopoly; though the monopoly is a natural one, which may be regulated, which may even be held as a trust for the community generally, but which cannot be prevented from existing. The reason why landowners are able to require rent for their land, is that it is a commodity which many want, and which no one can obtain but from them. If all the land of the country belonged to one person, he could fix the rent at his pleasure. The whole people would be dependent on his will for the necessaries of life, and he might make what conditions he chose… A thing which is limited in quantity, even though its possessors do not act in concert, is still a monopolized article.”

“On Rent”, John Stuart Mill, 1848

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There is perhaps no better explanation for why land and its returns, a subset of what is known as economic rent, is so unique than the above words of John Stuart Mill. Land is non-reproducible and purely limited in supply, the only way we as a society can access a particular plot of land is to buy it from that plot’s current landowner, nobody can reproduce it to provide at cheaper prices.

With nobody to compete in providing that plot of land, its landowner gets the power to charge society as much as they can afford to give, without the landowner having to provide anything in return.

The founding fathers of free market economic thought: Classical Liberal figures like Adam Smith and David Ricardo; as well as the later giants of economics they inspired, perhaps most famously Henry George, all recognized that the income of land was the income of a monopoly; it stood in contrast to the rewards of anything produced and provided in a competitive environment by workers or owners of capital.

Adam Smith makes mention of this in his pivotal and most popular work, The Wealth of Nations:

“The rent of land, therefore, considered as the price paid for the use of the land, is naturally a monopoly price. It is not at all proportioned to what the landlord may have laid out upon the improvement of the land, or to what he can afford to take; but to what the farmer can afford to give.”

Henry George would go on to become the single most famous advocate for taxing the value of land, heavily inspired by the writings of Smith and Ricardo. However, he, and even Adam Smith, weren’t the first to advocate for a market made truly free with a tax on the income of land.

Physiocracy

The first major group of free market advocates to call for the taxation of land value were the Physiocrats, a group of French economists who flourished in the mid to late 18th century. Some of their most famous members were Francois Quesnay and Pierre Samuel du Pont, the latter of whom shared correspondence with both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.

They referred to their tax on the landowner’s income as the Impôt unique, designed to replace all other taxes levied by the government. The Physiocrats recognized that taxes on the returns to land itself wouldn’t hamper production in the way other taxes would. They expanded this argument to advocate for free trade and the unhampered production and trade of goods and services.

This sentiment of the uniqueness of land as a tax base has been all but confirmed by modern economic thought. In the words of Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz:

“One of the general principles of taxation is that one should tax factors that are inelastic in supply, since there are no adverse supply side effects. Land does not disappear when it is taxed. Henry George, a great progressive of the late nineteenth century, argued, partly on this basis, for a land tax.

…

But it is not just land that faces a low elasticity of supply. It is the case for other depletable natural resources. Subsidies might encourage the early discovery of a resource, but they do not increase the supply of the resource; instead, that is largely a matter of nature. That is why it also makes sense to tax natural resource rents, from an efficiency point of view, at as close to 100 percent as possible.”

But, just how relevant are the rents of land and nature? The Physiocrats, Adam Smith, and David Ricardo were writing during a time before the Industrial Revolution, when agriculture and high amounts of land use were dominant. Now in our hi-tech economy, do those words still carry the same weight?

The answer is yes, in fact those words are more important than ever before. As we as a species have found ways to generate more wealth using less of land and other resources in inelastic supply, all that has simply led to those inelastic resources becoming far more valuable. Land, water, the electromagnetic spectrum, rare earth minerals, and more.

As an in-depth example, let’s take a look at one of the cradles of technological progress, Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley’s housing strain

Silicon Valley shows us that land has gotten more valuable and more relevant as time has gone on, as seen in their housing prices:

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Per this interactive map from the American Enterprise Institute, in 2023, land prices comprised about 75% of the overall prices of these houses.

A similar story can be seen in the United Kingdom, where land values have gone from a third to two-thirds of housing prices from 1957 to 2015.

The value of land has increased multiples over the past few centuries, while keeping its core role in the livelihoods of all. The progenitors of our market economy couldn’t have seen the path of progress we’d take, but the fundamental importance of land they saw has remained far after their time.

Truly Freeing the Market

The keys to a true free market were given to us by the group who served as one of its foremost thinkers, the Physiocrats. Their line of thinking was then passed through Smith, Ricardo, Mill, and most prominently, George. The Georgists who’ve followed Henry George’s depiction of the original Physiocratic message have gone on to apply this key to other resources which, like land, are fixed in supply.

Monopolies which corrupt the integrity of our market economy abound when allowed to profit from exclusively owning or using natural resources and limited legal privileges without payment. Add on heavy burdens placed on the trade and production that keeps the free market churning, and the market suddenly becomes very unfree and very monopolized. The key each person should know of when it comes to a true free market is this:

Stop taxing the value of things people produce, and instead recoup (or reform) the value of things that are non-reproducible

Simple, our market needs to rid itself of harmful taxation and the seeking out of economic rents that accrues to valuable, yet non-reproducible assets in order to become truly free as its most ardent advocates asked for. Tax the value of natural resources, and either tax or abolish limited legal privileges depending on what is preferred, then use any proceeds collected to untax work and investment.

Land remains far and away the most important of these assets and remains among the highest barriers of entry to a generation of people and businesses trapped under the rubble of high land prices and rents.

Around three and a half centuries ago the first steps of true free trade were taken in the hopes of unlocking economic potential with the key mentioned above. Three and a half centuries later, and it’s slipped from our hands, waiting to be found and enacted by those who recognize the fundamental distinction between production and monopoly.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published on thedailyrenter.com on August 24, 2025

The current economic dichotomy is flawed, and there is no greater show of it than the infighting between the two primary players of the production and trade that keep society flowing. In many calls for reformations to our current market system, upholding one means pushing down the other. Be it in the form of warring against unionization or raising heavier taxes on the profits of businesses and their capital.

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Each proposal fighting for one side or the other brings its own tradeoffs; inefficiencies and inequalities abound when the oxygen in economic discourse has been severely polluted by Labor and Capital warring with the other instead of the deeper, more insidious enemy that is yet to be dealt with.

The True Enemy

What is the true enemy that stings both workers and investors? Simply put, it’s those who benefit from Monopoly. That is ownership of a resource which is non-reproducible, whether by the laws of man or nature, and the unearned income that accompanies it, economic rent. There are several sources of economic rent that give rise to Monopoly. For example:

• Land

• Subsoil resource deposits (like oil wells and mines)

• Patents and copyrights over specific innovations

• Use of the electromagnetic spectrum (in particular radio frequencies)

• Water rights

• The rights-of-way used by natural monopolies like utilities or telecommunications

And many more.

Those who own these resources are able to profit off withholding or exclusively using what both laborers and capitalists need but can not produce more of, granting them power in the market by taking it from the two productive factors.

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What results is a burden that gets dropped on work and investment, keeping the economy from working at its best and leaving only the powerful monopolists intact. Society, in turn, suffers.

The Many Faces of Monopoly

Take land as an example, everybody needs it but can not get it from anyone other than those who own the land. Knowing that the rest of society can not make more land for cheap, those who own land can charge the rest of society as much as can be afforded.

Land brings massive gains without doing anything itself. How large are these gains? They’re in the hundreds of trillions, forming a massive portion, if not a majority, of the value of the largest asset class in the world, real estate. In the United States’ largest cities for example, land forms about 50 to 90 percent of all real estate value.

What does this mean for Labor and Capital? It means they must dedicate a heavy portion of their costs to paying for access to land, be it renting out a parcel or taking out a loan with a down payment. The latter adds further insult to injury by requiring extra interest payments for the land that is siphoned off to the bank. Even worse, land prices are heavily skewed by acts of speculation and hoarding that grab a portion of the ground’s value without providing anything of use in return to those whose paths they tread on.

The average person who works finds it more difficult to afford a house by the year. Farmland investment is pushing out working farmers, both workers and capital-owners in their own right, in favor of land speculators. Small businesses, led by capital-owners that hire workers, are in crisis with increasing costs of contract rent, much of which is the economic rent of land. All these issues can be heavily attributed to land, and the hunting of the profits associated with its exclusive ownership.

How about another example? Patents and copyrights (which I’ll call P&Cs for brevity) are legal protections which grant non-reproducible rights to use an invention. Owners of P&Cs are able to extract economic rents in a few ways, two primary methods being:

• charging higher prices to consumers above what a competitive market would fetch

• licensing the patent/copyright to another user, like how a landowner would rent out their non-reproducible plot of land to a commercial or residential user.

P&Cs over specific innovations are almost equivalent to “land” in an economic sense, a valuable resource which is non-reproducible by any others. While the returns of P&Cs are designed to be rewards for providing a useful innovation to society, they do so in a way that’s incredibly risky. and, unfortunately, prone to backwards incentives.

Big Tech companies will find copious amounts of extracted income by using their enormous armada of P&Cs to deny small tech competitors. Be it bundling their intellectual privileges to fully monopolize whole services, licensing them out, or just using them as a weapon by suing anyone unfortunate enough to cross paths with its protections.

Just like with owning land, laborers and capitalists are quashed under this monopoly privilege. Capital-owners are unable to access, well, capital that would help make their operations more productive and their goods and services more desirable and profitable. They are forced to bow down to those mega-corporations and speculators that carry out the most extensive hoarding of the exclusive rights to use the innovations that would improve their operations.

As a result of this, laborers are hurt as well. The efficiency in the economy that creates jobs and mobility is lost when the knowledge that enhances our society is hoarded or speculated on. While there needs to be a reward for innovation, the way our current system does so, handing out non-reproducible rights to use those innovations without any payment for the privilege, is one that needs serious improvement.

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The misuse of P&Cs and land-banking are a tell-tale sign that some of the worst problems Labor and Capital deal with today are not caused by their work in the economy. It is Renterism and the backwards dedication towards the hoarding and capturing of economic rents that take an ever-larger piece of the pie from each without growing it for either.

Those who claim the worker or the capital-owner are the source of the problem are blind to the greater enemy that lies deeper. Henry George detailed this in a testimony to the United States senate in 1883, as he put it then:

“I believe the conflict is really between labor and monopoly. Capital is the instrument and tool of labor, and under conditions of freedom there would be as much competition for the employment of capital as for the employment of labor…

The large businesses which yield great returns have in them always, I think, some element of monopoly.”

This ownership of these privileges and powers that others cannot have or compete for, is that greater enemy. Before we as a society can begin talking of the relationship between labor and capital, we have to acknowledge how heavily the well has been poisoned by, as George called it, monopoly.

The First Step

The first step to remediating the issues in our market economy and strengthening both the workers and capital-owners is simple. Let them, as producers, keep the value of production, and let the value of these non-reproducible privileges belong to society, or be dismantled.

Don’t tax the incomes of a laborer’s wage or a capital good’s yield, don’t tax the sales of goods and services that are created by labor and capital together, don’t tax the creation and upkeep of the buildings that house both in some capacity. Instead, tax the rent of land, tax or dismantle the rent of P&Cs in a way that keeps the innovator well rewarded, tax the value of the severance of water from its source, tax the use of the EM frequencies used for modern communications by broadcast licensees or IT platforms.

Switch from taxes on work and investment to the sharing or reducing of rent, end the regime of harmful taxes and rent-seeking which stifle true production. Only by fully realizing that dichotomy between production and trade versus the non-reproducible, will we be able to give ourselves a clear head on the true relationship between labor and capital.

National governments originate historically to acquire, hold and police land. Other functions are assumed later, but sovereignty over land is always the first business. Private parties hold land from the sovereign: every chain of title goes back to a grantor who originally seized the land.

When economists today speak of “rent—seeking” they usually are thinking not of basic land rent, but in subtle and sophisticated terms, looking at dribs and drabs of transfer rent derived from contracting advantages. They develop abstract models for gaming optimally with imperfect information, and so on. By emphasizing the arcane while ignoring the basic they are in danger of matching the proverbial expert who fine—tunes all the details and elaborations as he forges on to the grand disaster.

Indeed, we have had one such disaster. Viet Nam was viewed by many as an economists’ war, rationally planned and led by the best and the brightest systems’ analysts, exemplified by the brilliant, energetic Secretary of Defense. One should not be surprised at the post-Viet Nam decline of interest in applying modern economic theory to questions of global conflict.

We would be more useful to statesmen if we looked first at rent—seeking in the grosser sense of “land-grabbing”, where the whole bundle is at stake. When William of Normandy conquered England the prize was land rent, all of it. He and his retainers dispossessed the local rent—collectors. It was simple, gross, and basic, and much more consequential than the trivial rent—seeking we model today. The bulk of the natives may have been affected only marginally: they just paid Lord B instead of Lord A. But it made all the difference to Lords B and A, the ones who made basic decisions about global conflict and cooperation.

Again, from the 17th century Europeans invaded North America, dispossessed the natives and each other, until today we meet here, overlooking beach and ocean, paying our daily rent for a little slice of land which has been won and kept by a long chain of wars.

The roof over our heads is different, it is the product of capital formation. Someone saved from income, and paid workers to construct the building. Its present value is that less the obvious depreciation and obsolescence, so it is rentable today mainly for its appreciated site, to which therefore an economist or an appraiser must impute most of the market value here.

But the site never was nor could be the product of capital formation. It pre—existed man, who could only acquire it by taking. It is fair to say that throughout most of history that is what warfare was about, seizing and holding and policing land.

This is not to deny ancillary causes and issues of war, such as disputing the pathway to Heaven, ethnic pride, paranoia, acquisitive genes, and a leader’s need to divert people from domestic problems. Economists should certainly make it their business to address the last, a major source of global conflict.

Neither is this to deny that territorial expansion is often self-defeating, economically. Many empires, probably most, cost more than they return, a discovery that accounts for the well—being of small nations like Sweden, Austria, Denmark, and The Netherlands, which gained by abandoning destiny and empire. But we would miss the point to bury particulars in aggregates. By disaggregating benefits and costs we gain the key to understanding. The whole nation loses, but certain parties gain, and it is they who promote and sustain aggressive behavior.

Economists conventionally bury this point when they submit that “national defense is a public good”.

a) “Defense” is a loaded word which rationalizes as it describes. “Military spending” is more neutral, and will be used here. It is worth remembering that the German Schutz (as in Schutz—Staffel) and Wehr (as in Wehrmacht) both translate as “defense”. Lebensraum is a more forthright term, and explains much more about Nazi aggressions.

b) “Public good” says that all gain equally. But that is not true even of pure defense proper. What is defended behind the defense wall is land previously seized. The Lords and Barons have much at stake; the serfs and vagrants very little. Rent is what is being defended, along with, no doubt, traditional feelings of machismo and some local folkways and mores.

Wages, as well as the return for capital formation, ultimately need little defense because they are economically functional. They are paid for real service and sacrifices, and will command a return in almost any viable system. Labor is also more migratory. “Fixed” capital also migrates economically as capital recovery funds are reinvested elsewhere. Land, in contrast, does not migrate among nations. Nations are defined as areas of land.

But it is outside the defense wall of the nation proper that rent-seeking is most dynamic and destabilizing. Military force (often in tandem with finance) is used to project sovereignty into foreign nations, and over no-man’s—lands like the oceans, polar regions, radio spectrum, and outer space.

Offshore rent-seekers are of two general kinds.

1. “Caciques”. Cacique is a generic term for local cooperating rulers from the native population. It is more neutral than Quisling, and most caciques are more independent than he was. Imperial metropolitan powers normally work through caciques. Turnover among individual caciques is sometimes high, but they are drawn from the matrix of the local landholding oligarchy which is quite stable, often thanks to our support.

We relieve the caciques of collecting and/or paying taxes for their own military, which often double as domestic police as well. The life of some caciques is risky, but the rewards to caciques and local landholders are often very high. The Sultan of Brunei is the richest man in the world; the extravagance of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos is legendary.

Unit land values in Tokyo exceed those in New York and Chicago by a factor of about 10. One reason (of several) for the difference is that New York and Chicago pay taxes to defend Tokyo, plus what the Japanese once called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Roosevelt in 1941 stopped Japan at Viet Nam, precipitating Pearl Harbor. But Eisenhower said in 1959 we must defend Viet Nam to protect the Japanese resource base.

2. Rent-seekers of the second kind are U.S. or allied multinational interests, mostly corporations. The cacique is expected to assign to them, or be complaisant in their taking concessions and resources like minerals, transportation routes, communications, bank charters, plantations, etc.

Natives normally control more of the traditional resources like farmland. Foreigners specialize more in less visible, more novel and sophisticated resources like undiscovered minerals (exploration rights), navigation rights, radio spectrum, overflights, bank charters, etc.

Both these groups have the acutest incentive to influence U.S. policies, and large discretionary funds at hand. Therefore they tend to dominate U.S. statecraft. The U.S. government is probably more vulnerable to such foreign influence than most, because of our size and weakly developed sense of honorable dedication to the national interest. The English once terminated a dynasty, the Stuarts, which was caught taking support from France; but Americans hardly notice when retired Congressmen take work lobbying for foreign sugar producers etc.

Self-evidently, rivalry to appropriate limited rent-yielding resources must lead to conflict. It has to, because land is not produced, nor stored up like capital by saving. Modern economics glosses over this by stressing that land, like other resources, is allocated by the market. That may be, but distribution is something else. Every land title in the world goes back to a taking by force.

It will be objected that one can buy in peacefully once a tenure is firmly established, with alienable titles. There is certainly no intent to deny this. The problem is that a successor—in—interest stands on no firmer footing than the original. There is no laundering: every landholder can consult his chain of title and see how it originated. Indeed, it has been said that those who buy stolen property are the chief cause of crime. Fencing itself is a crime.

However one may side on that question, it helps account for the extreme alarm with which U.S. statecraft startles at any foreign country, however weak and innocuous, which expropriates any such successor—in—interest. Demonstration effects are contagious and threatening. The defensiveness of the insecure is a major cause of global conflict.

More destabilizing yet is the ambitious rent—seeker offshore, who finds his biggest gains in the riskiest ways, ways that unfortunately impose high risks on the U.S. The biggest gains to rent—seekers come from buying in on the ground floor, cheap, when tenures are precarious or uncertain.

Then one invokes the U.S. armed forces and the sanctions of ancillary statecraft to raise the value of one’s acquisition. The three main concerns are to firm up precarious tenures (as by supporting the government that granted them); to hold down taxes (as by lending the U.S. armed forces); and to avoid pure competition (as by giving preferential access to the U.S. market, or Pentagon procurers).

There have been spectacular success stories. Aramco is one. It originated in 1933 with a capital of $100,000. By 1970 it was valued at well over $5 billions. Of course that increase might represent accumulated capital flows from the U.S. owners; but such was not the fact.

There are four sources of value of foreign holdings: capital flows, plowbacks, appropriations, and appreciation. In many cases like Aramco the last two far outweigh the first. But they are products of statecraft and force, not of capital inputs proper.

Tenure granted by unstable governments is not worth much, and is therefore cheap to acquire. In 1960, for example, Patrice Lumumba pledged a substantial share of the Congo in return for a relatively modest loan from a Wall Street financier.

Of course there are also failures and losses, and someone might even try to show that aggregate losses exceed aggregate gains. But Adam Smith observed long ago that when an occupation offers a small number of extremely high rewards, its attractiveness is enhanced out of all proportion to their aggregate value. It is not just the successes, but all the attempts that provoke global conflict.

We are trained and conditioned to think of land tenure as something stable and inherited, with secure roots in history. In fact, that which was inherited can never be taken as given unless the origins bear examination. Past appropriation invites future expropriation. One result of that is a legal system even in “capitalist” America which tolerates rather extreme invasions of land value through zoning, rent control, taxation, and field price controls, without there being a legal “taking” such as might be prohibited by the 5th and 14th Amendments.

But in addition, tenure is constantly being created at the interfaces among sovereignties. Each is a potential flashpoint. Title to land is also contested within many sovereignties, like Mexico 1910—40, and Cuba 1962. Current examples are also nearby in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua. Every such internal contest makes an international incident or crisis.

Tenure is created at the margins of settlement and/or exploration, as on the OCS; the margins of political stability; and the margins of research and technology. In addition, tenure is constantly being tightened and refined at higher levels of intensity and demand for the services of scarce land. In recent decades the unprecedented voracious resource demands of the United States have been a major dynamic.

The views above have been characterized by some as “Marxist”, because of the explicit recognition of special class interests. If this be Marxism make the most of it; the point if any is ad hominem. But the views here differ from Marx’s. For one, Marx was an underconsumptionist who attributed imperialism to a search for overseas markets, not rent—seeking. For another, Marx made no sharp consistent distinction between land and capital.

The present views point toward specific policy changes. To minimize global conflict, a nation should use its tax system to recoup rents from beneficiaries of its statecraft. This would deflate the rent—seeking incentive to provocative behavior, as well as the discretionary funds used to gain political support. There is little gain to the nation as a whole, and high cost, in creating rents for a few individuals or corporations. A surtax on income from foreign sources, for example, rather than the present preferential treatment, is indicated.

An analogous movement is already underway in municipal affairs. Robert Freilich, a lawyer sometimes called the “father of growth control”, has worked out systems of urban growth whereby newly annexed lands must pay the full costs of their own development, instead of leeching on central cities as has been the custom. This has, where applied, drastically cooled down the passion for leapfrog annexations. I trust the analogy between municipal and national imperialism is evident.

To strengthen the nation and move toward justifying labelling defense a “public good”, a wider sharing of rents is indicated. This is a simple matter of readjusting tax systems. Many oil—rich jurisdictions already provide models, albeit modest in degree (like Alaska’s social dividend from oil royalties). Canada has a partially-developed system of interprovincial equalization of resource revenues. The result there, as one might expect, has been to heighten the sense of national unity and patriotism in the constructive sense, increasing the numbers of citizens honourably devoted to the nation as such.

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Wall Street analyst Dr. Michael Hudson argues that the Georgist fiscal philosophy will not make headway in practical politics until its advocates present a viable historical doctrine of the role played by land, its rent and its capital gains.

He proposes two streams of action:

• Promote serious professional discussion of the importance of taxing land so as to un-tax labour and direct capital investment.

• Explain the need to shift bank lending away from real estate speculation so as to steer the economy's savings back into direct capital investment.

His research programme comprises two parts:

1. Re-establish the importance of land and its rent as a shaping force of history by creating a group of economic historians focusing on the land issue; and organ/zing a prestigious series of colloquia on land use and the evolution of land rent and taxation.

2. Create a statistical model to demonstrate the importance of land and its rent in national income, and of land-value gains in the nation's balance sheet of wealth.

For years, admirers of Henry George have been bewildered at how many leading economists acknowledge that a tax on land is the least intrusive and least distorting form of tax (because it does not deter the production of more land), only to drop the matter rather than making it a central take-off point for their theorizing and policy prescription.

While many academic economists grant the theoretical point they do not see its political importance. After all, real estate is taxed locally at only a fraction (about 1%) of its market price, and pays little significant federal income tax. There is little discussion of changing matters, for public discussion deems it fair to tax income and sales via a value-added tax and related taxes on consumers (that is, on labour).

Although land rent formed the central thrust of classical economics, it has become marginalized as a sub-discipline ('land economies'). To counter the popular neuralgia that views real estate as a dry subject, we need to give the study of land a critical ideological mass. It is necessary to take rent beyond economic theory, and re-establish it as a political doctrine by establishing popular awareness of its dominant role in today's banking and finance, economic polarization and general prosperity or depression. For economic theories are perceived by the public in terms of their broad sweep - their ability to explain where the economy is going over time.

If a viable core theory is to be based on land and its rent, it cannot be viewed as being merely a marginal phenomenon; it must be perceived to be an important force shaping society's broad contours. More specifically, the role of land and its rent must be seen to be of such central fiscal and historical importance that it cannot be left out of account by economic theorists, historians or the designers of fiscal systems.

In the century since Henry George elevated land rent to a central political focus in Progress and Poverty (1879), the perception of land's importance has become marginalized even as its actual role has grown. Economists have telescoped the analysis of land into capital-in-general, despite the fact that land represents the major source of capital gains. The economic interpretation of history has been dominated by Marxists focusing on class conflict between labour and capital, not on the role of land tenure and rent in history.

The problem is thus not simply to get economic history into the core curricula, but to make the land issue central to economic history, and hence to the study of our own society's future.

For the idea of taxing land to become more widely discussed as a viable policy, the role of land and its rent - and of land's dominant role in the economy's capital gains -- must be established. For this to occur, land value and the magnitude of rent must be re-incorporated into economic theory. But this academic recognition in turn has a precondition. What is necessary is not only rent theory 'in the abstract', but a wide awareness that land value and rent are quantitatively important and behave uniquely. Fortunately, this can be statistically demonstrated.

1. Theories of land value and rent must go beyond technical microeconomic 'tools', to become a political doctrine.

Successful economic theories establish themselves as doctrines and 'isms' which involve policy advocacy at the broadest economy-wide level. Theories of land, for instance, are perceived in their embodiment as ideological doctrines. This is what made Progress and Poverty so powerful. Any theory must be capable of being persuasively applied to history as a law of social motion, for this is the way it shapes how people think about the future.

On the basis of Ricardo's treatment of rent, British political economy elaborated theories of value and prices, productive and unproductive employment, and a set of related concepts through which the economic history of civilization could be interpreted. To make this leap from theory to doctrine, however, it was necessary to go beyond analyzing economic rent in terms of value theory (i.e., as the excess of price over production costs, defined to include normal profits). The Ricardians showed how rent tends to rise over time at the expense of wages and profits, finally grinding economic progress to a halt.

Some of Henry George's followers tried to do the same by applying rent theory to urban real estate and natural monopolies, but the movement lost the historical thrust that it enjoyed at the hands of Thorstein Veblen, Francis Nielsen and a few others.

2. The importance of a doctrine of land-use and its taxation lies in its ability to explain (and indeed, to warn) how rent relations will shape society's future evolution.

A theory of land and its rent can demonstrate how today's polarizing economic trends are leading to something other than the commonly accepted 'business as usual' expectations. It can show the warping of our fiscal system, of our financial system (how savings are recycled largely to inflate real estate bubbles), and how tax favoritism for land speculation deters new direct investment and development.

What is remarkable is that no such perception exists, despite the excesses of the 1980s. Much of the explanation lies in the degree to which classical economics took a Marxist rather than Georgist path. In view of this development, it is useful to ask why Marxism emerged so victorious, driving George's name off the social and political stage.

The answer is not to be found in economic theory as such (i.e. Marx's theory of surplus value), but rather in the way that Marx's ideas were elaborated into a social doctrine and infused into the academic social sciences, while George's ideas were not.

At the hands of Marx's followers, historical materialism offered more than just an economic theory or 'tool' as such. It offered an explanatory key to the unfolding of history. Marx and Engels translated their ideas into anthropological terms by elaborating Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society, and V. Gordon Childe followed up by describing the origins of urbanization in Marxist class terms. Marxist views of ancient and medieval history were expounded by Max Beer's Social Struggles in Antiquity (already before there were Marxist classes!). Moses Finley, Ste. Croix and others carved out the field in Marxist terms.

Unfortunately, much of what emerged was an anachronistic misreading of history. Antiquity's revolutionary cry was not one of wage-slaves, but a demand for cancellation of the debts and redistribution of the land.

Admirers of George included the German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer, but his work came to be absorbed into the Marxist tradition, as did that of Werner Sombart. For the fact is that it was almost only the Marxists who retained a long historical view.

George's followers let the social dimension of Progress and Poverty be stripped away, narrowing his idea from a doctrine of collecting rent to fund public budgets, to the status merely of a (micro-) theory of price formation, exiled from the core economics curriculum to the academic wastes of land economies'. Singling out rent theory to the exclusion of all other dimensions of political economy, sociology and history turned George's idea into a narrow theoretical point.

Georgism might have countered Marxism on its own ground of historical materialism by pointing out the importance of the land question in antiquity, in medieval Europe, and in the tribal communities analyzed by anthropologists. Yet it was the Marxists who picked up what the French call le longue duree of social and economic institutions.

3. A doctrine of rent must be able to explain the broad sweep of history, including the future.

Instead of building on the classical economic tradition by doing for urban land prices what Ricardo did for the value of farmland, the followers of George have removed the theory of economic rent from its historical context. Marxism has thus been left alone to claim the mantle of classical political economy.

To become a doctrine, economic theory must place itself in the context of the social whole. It must involve a theory of history, of social behaviour, and even of intellectual history, for it is natural to think of the whole, and intellectually crippling to think of only the parts. Let us therefore ask what pitfalls befell the Henry George movement and blocked it from successfully institutionalizing its rent and fiscal theory as a viable doctrine.

To become a political doctrine in its own right, the theory of rent would have to involve a view of the economy at large, and indeed to become nothing less than a theory of society and of history. It would explain the progress of rent over time, and how the appropriation of rent (and the land's breaking free of taxation) has shaped societies for better or worse, affecting the distribution of income and wealth so as to promote prosperity or poverty.

By creating a political doctrine based on grounding taxation on the land's rental value, the theory of rent had an opportunity to mount a challenge to become the Economics of the Future. It might, in short, have become as fullblown a doctrine in its own right as Marxist socialism became.

To achieve this broad political appeal, it would have had to place the taxation of land in the context of overall fiscal policy, by calculating the volume of revenue available to be taxed. It also would have traced what landlords did with the rent they received. For if they used it to build new factories and employ labour so as to expand productive activities, they would have been vehicles for economic welfare.

But as Ricardo, John Ramsey McCulloch and John Stuart Mill observed, landlords tended to dissipate their rental income by hiring unproductive labour (such as servants). The problem with rentier income was that it ate into investment, substituting a parasitic overhead for underlying economic growth. Under existing conditions, the monopolization of land rent threatened to grind prosperity to a halt.

This perception provides a key to understand today's post-industrial land bubble.

4. Any theory should be illustrated statistically.

A land tax requires popular awareness of the magnitude of rent and land-value gains. Yet today, a century after George's death, the magnitude of rent and land-value gains remain a secret that has not been demonstrated to the public at large (although the banking and insurance industries have learned it well).

Followers of Henry George have not related the magnitude of rental income and land-value gains to the economy's overall income and capital gains, or to its fiscal needs. Without such a calculation it is not possible to gauge the extent to which the failure to tax real estate's rental income has been the major contributing factor to the US government's chronic budget deficits.

A statistical quantification of rent would show it to be the major element in the economy's build-up of wealth. This is why real estate forms the most important form of collateral underlying the banking and credit system, and hence is the foundation of credit bubbles and the business cycle. It also is an increasingly important element in industrial cost structures, and of living costs for consumers.

Yet by playing these roles, real estate provides scarcely any of the federal government's fiscal needs. Indeed, land-value gains are generated precisely because real estate cash flow is virtually free of income taxation. Only by calculating the magnitude played by rent in each of these dimensions can its specific importance be demonstrated -- its potential for taxation, on the one hand, or the extent to which private appropriation of rent is recycled into yet more mortgage lending to inflate the land bubble.

5. Georgist theory in particular must be statistically quantified to be deemed important.

The concept of 'fully' taxing the land has not been spelled out statistically. The real estate industry is left with its small print in the tax code, providing legal loopholes to minimize its fiscal obligations. Yet instead of advocating the full taxation of land, many Georgists have leapt on the anti-tax bandwagon opposing a rise in overall real estate taxes.

The upshot is that no Georgist institution today is calculating the annual magnitude of rent and of land-value gains. Failing to popularize such calculations, the Henry George movement has failed to get off the ground. Indeed, one may ask, what are its institutions all about, if not to undertake this basic research? What do they have to interest the public, if not something relevant to say about the volume and incidence of rent, year after year, and its impact on the credit system and other economic conditions?

The proper task of the Henry George institutions should be to carry forth the legacy of his spirit by translating rent theory into a quantitative statistical format, to explain to the world what is important about the land and other natural resources.

Yet not all groups in the Georgist camp endorse taxing increases in land value, or closing tax loopholes such as over-depreciation so as to impose an income tax on rental cash flow, or imposing property taxes of more than the nominal 1% of real estate values in an environment where prices are rising by about 10% annually. Such ideological disputes have deterred the necessary empirical study.

6. Rent and land-value theory need to be incorporated into the broad financial theory of saving. For in today's world, most rental income is paid out to mortgage bankers as interest and is recycled into new real estate lending to inflate the land bubble.

Modem economies have transformed the social context of rent. Over the past century it has become normal to buy real estate on credit. The upshot is that the bankers and other mortgage lenders (including insurance companies and pension funds) have ended up with most of the rent, in the form of interest. They recycle most of this interest into new mortgage lending to inflate land prices all the more, thus generating yet more capital gains for real estate developers.

Whereas British landlords a century ago were accused of dissipating their resources on servants, the church and other unproductive labour (including a penchant for military adventurism), today's mortgage bankers transform rental income into interest charges to pay for an increasingly burdensome financial sector.

Recycling mortgage interest into new lending tends to create an ascending spiral of land prices. Rent is extracted from the economy and paid to the banking system, which recycles it to inflate the real estate bubble. This makes home ownership more expensive, along with office space and industrial plant.

It is remarkable that today, more than a century after Progress and Poverty's publication, followers of Henry George have made little attempt to incorporate this financial development into their treatment of rent.

For a modern macro-economic rent theory to recognize these processes, it is necessary to integrate rent theory with banking theory to create a general theory of rentier income, and of society's growing debt - mortgage debt, public debt, business and personal debt. Every flow of income, of saving and of debt must be related to the whole system-wide process, not treated in isolation.

7. Today's fiscal crises stem largely from a failure to tax rent and land-value gains.

A strong case can be made that the United States, Europe and Japan have run increasingly large budget deficits as a result of their failure to tax real estate (along with the oil and gas sectors, mining and the air waves). The government's failure to tax real estate leads to budget deficits financed by yet higher interest charges. Yet the lion's share of the rental income freed in this way has not ended up in the pockets of the landlords but has accrued to the banks and other lenders.

Rental income thus has been transformed into interest. On the economy-wide level, new savings tend to constitute an accrual of interest on past savings (by the wealthiest 10% of the population plus the large institutional investors) that are lent out in a credit pyramid growing at an exponential rate (the rate of interest).

8. Integration of the 'real' economy and finance -- with finance the most 'real' driving force.

Economists analyzing land-rent should be in the forefront of all the groups to understand the remarkable stock-market run-up since 1993, for what has fuelled this run-up is accumulated rental cash flow, recycled as savings. The mechanism is classical in its simplicity. Rent is squeezed out of real estate and paid to the bankers and other mortgage lenders as interest. Indeed, landlords are willing to pay all their net rental income over and above costs as interest, in the hope of reaping capital gains - mainly, land-value gains.

The creditors recycle their interest income into yet more lending -- mainly mortgage lending under normal conditions. But since 1991 there have not been normal conditions. The world real estate bubble burst (except in Russia, where it was just beginning). The banks' loan policy was based mainly on mortgage lending, which had fallen into depression. With this market dead, they lowered the interest they offered depositors, so as to reflect what they could earn by investing these deposits in government bonds. (The Federal Reserve System's quarterly flow-of-funds statistical reports clearly document this manoeuvring.)

Depositors had grown accustomed to high rates of return during the bubble years of the 1980s. In search of continued high returns, they shifted their savings out of the banks into money-market funds and mutual funds. These in turn invested their new-found money not in real estate, where the banks had been putting it, but in the stock market. The upshot was a run-up in the Dow Jones from 4,000 to 6,500 points, while real estate prices barely budged.

The stock market has been inflated by savings that hitherto have gone into bidding up the price of land. Who should see this more clearly than Georgists? They need only remember their rent theory to see the extent to which real estate is the primary source of economic surplus, new saving and capital-market funding.

Yet the Henry George movement has not pursued the analysis of rent to ask what happens to rental cash flow (and land-value gains) when it no longer is recycled into new mortgage lending. Land speculators are vilified, but not the mortgage bankers standing behind them and supporting their tax breaks politically, in the knowledge that most land rent will be transmuted into mortgage interest in due course.

A successful theory must warn of a major anomaly soon to appear. One seems to be at hand in the teeter-totter movement between stock market and real estate gains. As a symbiosis has developed between the real estate sector, finance and insurance, the dream of post-industrial economies voiced in the 1970s is turning out to be merely a real estate and stock market bubble (euphonized as 'gentrification'), rather than an upgrading of productive capacity and living standards.

It is the lull before the storm -- a storm most likely to hit when governments find they have sold off all their assets in order to keep paying interest to their bondholders. At this point, they must either default or begin to tax their real estate holders and the financiers behind them.

The theory of rent and land value gains can offer an explanation of this crisis by showing how real estate investors expend their cash flow, and how the economy's savings are channelled to increase real estate prices so as to create financial bubbles.

As a proportion of total US state and local revenues, real estate taxes have shrunk from nearly 70% a half-century ago to just about 30% today. While gross rental revenue was in the neighborhood of $600-$700 billion in the early 1990s, only about 0.3% of this was paid out as federal income tax.

By wretchedunion

This is how the sweatshop debate is pitched to you—as an absurd false choice made to seem like common sense.

Econ models, ethics panels, and policy briefs all begin from this binary, as if nothing came before it. Centuries of enclosures, debt peonage, and bans on ‘self-sufficiency’ forcing people into wage hunger—this is all just background noise, never considered.

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First come all the stock excuses that try to make the choice seem inevitable:

• ‘Better than begging’ (after we outlawed self-sufficiency/vagrancy).

• ‘Labor laws kill jobs’ (the jobs they threaten are those that survive by keeping you silent and disposable).

• ‘Low skills’ (told to the same people running dense, multi-crop polycultures that outyield most industrial farms).

• ‘Capital scarcity’ (capital isn’t scarce—it’s locked behind tariff/IP walls and export-credit pipelines open only to entrenched cartels).

• ‘Foreign investment is lifting them’ (money that buys legislators and decades-long tax abatements before it funds a single wage. Locals inherit nothing—factories arrive cushioned by subsidies/cash-incentives, drain profits through transfer-pricing/royalty fees, then bolt).

Development economists still bless these excuses. Arthur Lewis’ (Nobel-crowned) ‘dual-sector’ model literally casted rural labor as an ‘endless reserve army,’ good for nothing except sub-subsistence factory pay. Industrial profit, not pay, is meant to fund growth. A black, progressive, anti-colonial(!) economist branded slavery as a developmental virtue.

And then come all the ’empowerment’ and ‘ethical sourcing’ slogans that soothe consumer guilt at zero inconvenience. Corporate PR teams pipe in soft-focus videos of grateful slaves and boardrooms applaud their own pathetic ‘impact reports.’

Economists call this progress, the media calls it hope, and the worker is told to thank the boot pressing on her neck.

The question is never ‘Can Nike or Shein raise wages by just a little?’ This concedes that millions must either rent themselves out on any terms—or starve.

The prior question is—who built this fucking prison to begin with?

Why are wages everywhere driven to the bare subsistence margin? Why the fuck are these families all landless, and forced to keep begging? Because violent evictions for export plantations, crop-levy debts, and policy raids on unions stripped workers of every other way to eat.

This is why children in Dhaka queue for 12-hour shifts—the 1982 Land Acquisition Act expropriated their families’ land via cash-crop foreclosure and ‘river-erosion’ claims. Export-zone statutes then empowered police to jail the parents who organized or threatened an export license.

Vietnam’s IMF-era ‘relief’ demanded cuts to every extension service, seed bank and price-support that anchored rice farming since independence. The price of urea tripled in five years; procurement prices were floated; and rural credit for small farmers was choked off. Families that once comfortably subsisted on one or two bighas of paddy were now priced out of their land, food, and fuel. Climate change also eroded their only fallback—the creeping saltwater intrusion in the Ganges Delta pushed farmers off paddies and further inland, directly into factory queues.

By 1990 roughly two million peasants had been reduced to dire fucking wretchedness as either sharecroppers or migrants, precisely as the first export-processing zones at Savar & Chittagong emerged. Zoning authority then shifted to army officers who locked the zones into union-free enclaves for corporations.

This is the old, timeless colonial model—seize land, outlaw self-provision, and impose cash levies payable only by selling your skin at a slave-wage (the hut tax in Zambia, pass laws in South Africa, head taxes in Kenya). The lash of hunger marched every slave to the factory, mine, and plantation; and the colonizers called this ‘progress’ for the ‘idle peasants’ now ‘blessed’ with wages.

Fence off the commons, tax the little that people earn, and the choice narrows to starvation or servitude. It forces capital and labour to the cheapest surviving edge—and when that edge is exhausted, rent hunts the new extractive frontier in ‘design’ patents, retail trademarks, and import markups. This is the pivot from labor-intensive plantations to fast-fashion logos—it’s a different arena, but the same extractive leash.

We dispossess, displace, deregulate, and then they call the sweatshop a lifeline.

The margin of cultivation—where a family could once live by right of labor—is everywhere fenced, taxed in advance by speculative holding costs, or poisoned by prior extraction.

Reclaim the commons, and their dignity returns.

Give land back to those who till it, repudiate their debt, free unions—and no more slave bargains.

A real, locally managed commons—like the pre-NAFTA Mexican ejido—would ignite real growth as workers reinvest the land’s rent in seed banks, small-tool lending, and community funds.

Neighbors would meet as coequals, standing on ground everyone stewards and no one hoards.

The U.S. housing market is experiencing its largest imbalance on record, with nearly 500,000 more home sellers than buyers, according to a recent report by Redfin. As of April 2025, there are an estimated 1.94 million active home listings compared to approximately 1.45 million buyers which makes a 33.7% gap said to be the most lopsided buyer-seller ratio since at least 2013.

Redfin projects that home prices will fall by roughly 1% nationally by the end of the year as the market adjusts to this surplus of sellers.

“The balance of power in the U.S. housing market has shifted toward buyers,” said Redfin Senior Economist Asad Khan, “but a lot of sellers have yet to see or accept the writing on the wall.”

High mortgage rates and economic uncertainty are major contributors to the buyer slowdown. The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate was 6.73% in April, more than double the pandemic-era lows. Meanwhile, the median price of a home in the U.S. rose to $431,931, pricing many new homebuyers out of the market despite the slowing price growth.

Condo markets are especially affected, with 83.5% more sellers than buyers. Single-family homes have a 27.8% surplus of sellers, while townhomes show a 33% gap.

Out of the 50 largest U.S. metro areas, 31 are now classified as “buyer’s markets”.

Miami leads with sellers outnumbering buyers by nearly 200%, followed by several other Florida cities including West Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale. These Sun Belt metros saw rapid homebuilding during the pandemic and are now seeing inventory far exceed demand.

On the opposite end, seven metro areas remain seller’s markets. Newark, New Jersey, has 47.1% fewer sellers than buyers, and its median home price rose 12.2% year-over-year which is the largest increase among the top 50 metros.

In total, the data suggest a cooling housing market as elevated costs and market saturation shift negotiating power toward buyers for the first time in years.

One Tax to Rule Them All

Niccolò Franceschi

May 30, 2025

The Single Tax Movement was a political movement that emerged in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, following the publication of Progress and Poverty in 1879. Its core idea, evident in its name, was to replace all existing taxes with a single tax on the unimproved value of land. Classical Georgists assert that this tax is the only necessary and sufficient one to fund a government, not to mention the only morally justified one.

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Talking Trash Tuesdays are Back!

Eric Reingardt

May 29, 2025

The Homeless Economist is back for Tuesday Talking Trash! Check out our news website thedailyrenter.com

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Tom L Johnson, The Mayor who Made Cleveland Great: His History, His Ideas, and His Legacy

Jimbo

May 26, 2025

Cleveland is a city that’s currently on the decline, with a population less than half of its peak around 1950, it’s clear that the once great city needs a mayor who can revitalize it. The answer may just lie in the movement of the man that brought the city to said greatness.

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Texas House Declaws NIMBY Veto Power in Major Housing Reform Bill

Eric Reingardt

May 12, 2025

The Texas House of Representatives has passed House Bill 24, a major housing reform measure that would reduce the power of local property owners to block new development, especially affordable and multifamily housing. The bill passed with bipartisan support (83–56) and went to the Texas Senate, which has already passed a similar proposal.

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Background

Cleveland is a city that’s currently on the decline, with a population less than half of its peak around 1950, it’s clear that the once great city needs a mayor who can revitalize it. The answer may just lie in the movement of the man that brought the city to said greatness.

Back at the end of the 20th century, Cleveland was a small city of about 100,000 people, and it was growing fast. Alongside this increase in population was an increase in attraction, and one of the men who were attracted to Cleveland’s rise was Tom L. Johnson.

Tom L. Johnson: The Greed-Driven Robber Baron

Johnson was a man in his 20s looking for ways to gain wealth quickly, at a time when the United States was undergoing rapid industrialization. As it turns out, Johnson was smack dab in the middle of the Gilded Age, where the most powerful fortunes were made not through producing and providing goods and services as a laborer or a capitalist, but by controlling the resources used in the production process which were non-reproducible. The great key to wealth was being a monopolist.

Seeking to ride this wave, Johnson acquired massive interests in the street railways of Cleveland and other growing cities of the era, where the rise in population and the resulting rise in demand for Johnson’s land and rail lines could give him vast amounts of wealth without providing anything in return. But he didn’t stop there. Johnson then went further and obtained railway patents that ensured none of his competitors would be able to reproduce the services his railway interests provided, giving himself unbridled power at the cost of the rest of society.

With ownership over all of these non-reproducible natural resources and legal privileges combined, Johnson obtained the power to extract wealth from the people of Cleveland and others who were forced into his monopolistic services, their wealth flowing to his pockets without anything in return.

It was at this point that it seemed Johnson’s legacy would be set. He would go down as a Robber Baron, one of many men who lived in infamy among an age of suffering; monopolists of the Gilded Age who got rich by lording over the income of hard-working laborers and truly investing capitalists. His path was set out for him and his bed was made, and nothing, it seemed, would take him off this course.

Or so it was, until a chance meeting led him down the path of personal reform and eventual redemption, started by reading and then meeting the reformer who would become his personal hero and his greatest inspiration. While riding on a train from Indianapolis to Cleveland, a train conductor encouraged Johnson to read a work called Social Problems, one of the most popular books in the catalogue of Henry George.

While he was reluctant at first, he eventually gave in to the conductor’s demands and read George’s book. It changed his life. Social Problems profoundly impacted Johnson’s outlook on both his actions and the nature of the Gilded Age, to the point of causing a complete reversal in his moral character. In his newly reformed eyes, he had been contributing to the great evil that had kept progress from lifting all in society up. What was once his source of wealth and power—the private income he reaped from his non-reproducible resources and privileges—had been revealed to him as his true great enemy.

The course that Johnson was supposed to take, the course of rent-seeking at the cost of true production, had been derailed in favor of the opposite. Johnson became a firm believer that those who produced and provided must be protected and empowered, while those who extracted wealth in the way he had as a monopolist needed to have their powers dismantled.

It was from the ashes of this original derailment that a new Tom L. Johnson arose.

Tom L. Johnson: The Reform-minded Georgist

Tom Johnson’s personal reform culminated in a meeting with Henry George, where the now extremely popular reformer encouraged him to enter politics.

In 1901, after some years of trying and George’s death a few years earlier in 1897, Johnson achieved his highest post by running for mayor in the city of Cleveland. He ran on a Democratic platform advocating to undo the harms his old self and other monopolists of the time had inflicted on the people of the rapidly growing city.

Johnson won the mayorship and immediately went to work. He fought against the city’s natural monopolists in the rail and utilities industries by forcefully reducing the fares charged by the former and publicizing the services of the latter. He reclaimed land his predecessors had been preparing to sell to the railroad barons of the city, and he helped foster public parks and infrastructure.

Perhaps most importantly, Johnson implemented a new system of real estate evaluation that targeted the value of Cleveland’s non-reproducible land. This brought in significant revenue from the ultra-wealthy landowners of the city. The new revenue system taxed the same type of land profiteer Johnson himself had once been, and it allowed Cleveland to grow both efficiently and equitably.

Johnson was incredibly popular, winning reelection three more times and serving a mayoralty of eight years, from 1901 to 1909. During his time as mayor, he transformed Cleveland into a thriving city, roughly four times the size it had been when he first took office.

Unfortunately, the strain and effort Johnson put into advocating for the ideology that reformed him took a toll on his health. In 1911, just two years after retiring from the position of Cleveland’s mayor, Johnson fell gravely ill and passed away. He left behind a lasting legacy of standing up for the people most in need.

Tom L. Johnson: A Heroic Legacy

Johnson left behind a legacy of heroism, aiding Cleveland at a crucial inflection point in American history in a way that would not be forgotten. Eighty-four years after his final days as mayor, a 1993 survey by Melvin Holli ranked Johnson as the second greatest mayor in United States history, second only to Fiorello LaGuardia of New York City.

Johnson had a statue built in his honor, and in that statue’s right hand is a sculpture of Henry George’s masterwork, Progress and Poverty.

Cleveland is a city that seems to have lost much of its greatness, but what has been lost can be found again. The key lies with the personal hero of the man who brought Cleveland its greatest days. The words of Henry George are the words Cleveland needs to hear today.

The Agricultural Squeeze: How Our Working Farmers are Being Pushed into Poverty

Mar. 23, 2025

Farming is perhaps the most important, and among the longest-lasting, professions in human history. We cannot survive without food, so regardless of how different our jobs may be from the rural lifestyle, we all rely on the subset of our population who dedicate their hard work and labor to producing and providing us with the sustenance we need for survival.

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Austin, Texas Builds New Housing, Drives Rents Down 22%

Mar. 19, 2025

The Texas capital, once a classic case of unsustainably rising rents in a hot housing market, is now leading the nation in rental price declines thanks to an unprecedented housing construction boom. Rents in Austin have plummeted 22% from their peak in August 2023, the largest drop of any major U.S. city, according to data from Redfin.

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Shen calls his senators and crashes out

Mar. 18, 2025

yes i’m aware that i keep saying “member of nevada” and “member of new york” i have no idea why i said that twice shut up!!!

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Fred Harrison’s 18-Year Cycle Signals 2026 Land Crash as Warren Buffett Retreats from Real Estate

Mar. 17, 2025

As the United States housing market shows increasing signs of stress, Georgist economist Fred Harrison’s 18-year property cycle theory (which accurately predicted the 2008 crash in the 90s) is once again drawing attention.

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Due to scheduling conflicts there was no Weekly Renter last week. We are returning to normal scheduling next week. Thank you for supporting our independent journalism work.

- Eric Reingardt, Editor-in-Chief

The Many Sources of Economic Rent – Part 4: Natural Monopolies

Mar. 13, 2025

Water, electricity, sewage. These are all utilities that play a tremendous role in our well-being. Quenching our thirst, powering our TVs and computers, flushing away our waste are all invaluable appliances in our modern lifestyle…

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thedailyrenter.com

The Many Sources of Economic Rent – Part 3: Pollution

Mar. 12, 2025

So far in this series, we’ve discussed economic rent as income gained from taking non-reproducible natural resources for oneself. Usually this manifests itself in exclusive ownership or a monopoly of some sort, whether it be land, Intellectual property rights (IP) or non-renewable resources.

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Trump Admin Freezes Affordable Housing Projects in Indiana Amid Nationwide DOGE Cuts

Mar. 10, 2025

The Fair Housing Center of Central Indiana (FHCCI) is among several housing advocacy groups nationwide facing funding cuts due to cost-cutting measures implemented by Elon Musk’s personal consulting organization “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE). The move has resulted in the termination of the remainder of a $138,889 grant that was expected to sustain the organization through June 30, 2025.

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Florida Pushes to Phase Out Property Taxes, Raising Fiscal Questions

Mar. 7, 2025

Governor Ron DeSantis and Republican lawmakers in Florida are advancing proposals to phase out property taxes, a move that could reshape the state’s fiscal structure but faces challenges in replacing the estimated $50 billion in revenue these taxes generate annually.

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The Hidden Key to Housing Construction: How Georgism Complements and Completes YIMBYism

Mar. 6, 2025

We are currently in the midst of a crisis. It’s not an invasion from a foreign threat or an internal civil war pitting brother against brother. This current crisis strikes in the form of unaffordability. More specifically, it exists in the incredibly high cost of one of our core necessities: we know it as the Housing Crisis.

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Bon Weekend! I am sending this newsletter out on a Saturday today when we usually send these on Fridays because we had an additional article posted this week. Thank you for supporting independent Georgist media.

- Eric Reingardt, Editor-in-Chief

DOGE vs Seeing the Cat: Single Taxers Fought for Government Efficiency Before it Was Cool

Feb. 21, 2025

Long before the hip trendsetters, tech billionaires, crypto bros and influencers who pumped their shitcoins and NFTs for the past 10 or more years ascended to the White House, there was another populist fiscal reform movement in the turn of the previous century taking America by storm, known as the Single Taxers.

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thedailyrenter.com

Indiana House Kills Homelessness Criminalization Bill, Housing Advocates Say Fight Isn’t Over

Feb. 20, 2025

A controversial bill that would have criminalized homelessness in Indiana has been defeated in the state’s House of Representatives, a significant but potentially temporary victory for Indiana housing advocates.

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The Many Sources of Economic Rent – Part 1: Intellectual Property

Feb. 19, 2025

This article is part 1 of a mini-series on The Daily Renter dedicated to talking about the many sources of economic rent other than the big one, land. For our first part, we have a particularly relevant one given recent booms in technological prowess, Intellectual Property.

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Land Prices Have Outpaced Inflation and Construction Costs in Australia

Feb. 18, 2025

Land prices in Australia have reached new heights, significantly outpacing both inflation and construction cost increases, as supply challenges continue to affect the housing market.

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A Justification of Georgist Fiscal Policy – Part 2: Government Spending

Feb. 17, 2025

The counterpart of just and efficient taxation is just and efficient government spending, Henry George, the 19th century economist, saw government spending and taxation as two sides of the same coin.

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