In economics, a free market is an economic system in which the prices of goods and services are determined by supply and demand expressed by sellers and buyers. Such markets, as modeled, operate without the intervention of government or any other external authority. Proponents of the free market as a normative ideal contrast it with a regulated market, in which a government intervenes in supply and demand by means of various methods such as taxes or regulations. In an idealized free market economy, prices for goods and services are set solely by the bids and offers of the participants.
Marsilio T. Ficino was an Italian scholar and Catholic priest who was one of the most influential humanist philosophers of the early Italian Renaissance. He was an astrologer, a reviver of Neoplatonism in touch with the major academics of his day, and the first translator of Plato's complete extant works into Latin. His Florentine Academy, an attempt to revive Plato's Academy, influenced the direction and tenor of the Italian Renaissance and the development of European philosophy.
William Spencer Vickrey was a Canadian-American professor of economics and Nobel Laureate. He was a lifelong faculty member at Columbia University. A theorist who worked on public economics and mechanism design, Vickrey primarily discussed public policy problems. He originated the Vickrey auction, introduced the concept of congestion pricing in networks, formalized arguments for marginal cost pricing, and contributed to optimal income taxation. James Tobin described him as "an applied economist’s theorist, as well as a theorist’s applied economist.”
A land value tax (LVT) is a levy on the value of land without regard to buildings, personal property and other improvements upon it. Some economists favor LVT, arguing it does not cause economic inefficiency, and helps reduce economic inequality. A land value tax is a progressive tax, in that the tax burden falls on land owners, because land ownership is correlated with wealth and income. The land value tax has been referred to as "the perfect tax" and the economic efficiency of a land value tax has been accepted since the eighteenth century. Economists since Adam Smith and David Ricardo have advocated this tax because it does not hurt economic activity, and encourages development without subsidies.
Henry George was an American political economist and journalist. His writing was immensely popular in 19th-century America and sparked several reform movements of the Progressive Era. He inspired the economic philosophy known as Georgism, the belief that people should own the value they produce themselves, but that the economic value of land should belong equally to all members of society. George famously argued that a single tax on land values would create a more productive and just society.
In neoclassical economics, economic rent is any payment to the owner of a factor of production or resource, supply of which is fixed. In classical economics, economic rent is any payment made or benefit received for non-produced inputs such as location (land) and for assets formed by creating official privilege over natural opportunities. In the moral economy of neoclassical economics, economic rent includes income gained by labor or state beneficiaries of other "contrived" exclusivity, such as labor guilds and unofficial corruption.
Classical economics, also known as the classical school of economics, or classical political economy, is a school of thought in political economy that flourished, primarily in Britain, in the late 18th and early-to-mid 19th century. It includes both the Smithian and Ricardian schools. Its main thinkers are held to be Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo, Thomas Robert Malthus, and John Stuart Mill. These economists produced a theory of market economies as largely self-regulating systems, governed by natural laws of production and exchange.
Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, stifled competition, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality, risk of growing corruption and cronyism, decreased public trust in institutions, and potential national decline.
Georgism, also called in modern times Geoism, and known historically as the single tax movement, is an economic ideology holding that people should own the value that they produce themselves, while the economic rent derived from land—including from all natural resources, the commons, and urban locations—should belong equally to all members of society. Developed from the writings of American economist and social reformer Henry George, the Georgist paradigm seeks solutions to social and ecological problems, based on principles of land rights and public finance that attempt to integrate economic efficiency with social justice.
Harold Hotelling was an American mathematical statistician and an influential economic theorist, known for Hotelling's law, Hotelling's lemma, and Hotelling's rule in economics, as well as Hotelling's T-squared distribution in statistics. He also developed and named the principal component analysis method widely used in finance, statistics and computer science.
Merrill Mason Gaffney was an American economist and a major critic of Neoclassical economics from a Georgist point of view. Gaffney first read Henry George's masterwork Progress and Poverty as a high school junior. This interest led him to Harvard University in 1941 but, unimpressed with their approach to economics he left in 1942 to join the war effort. After serving in the southwest Pacific during World War II he earned his B.A. in 1948 from Reed College in Portland, Oregon. In 1956 he gained a Ph.D. in economics at the University of California, Berkeley. There he addressed his teachers' skepticism about Georgism with a dissertation titled "Land Speculation as an Obstacle to Ideal Allocation of Land." Gaffney was Professor of Economics at the University of California, Riverside from 1976 onwards. He died in July 2020 at the age of 96.
Richard Rapier Stokes, was a British soldier and Labour politician who served briefly as Lord Privy Seal in 1951.
A real-estate bubble or property bubble is a type of economic bubble that occurs periodically in local or global real estate markets, and it typically follows a land boom. A land boom is a rapid increase in the market price of real property such as housing until they reach unsustainable levels and then declines. This period, during the run-up to the crash, is also known as froth. The questions of whether real estate bubbles can be identified and prevented, and whether they have broader macroeconomic significance, are answered differently by schools of economic thought, as detailed below.
The School of Philosophy and Economic Science (SPES), also operating under the names the School of Philosophy and the School of Practical Philosophy and legally named the School of Economic Science (SES), is a worldwide organisation based in London. It offers non-academic courses for adults, ranging from an introductory series called Practical Philosophy to more advanced classes. Its teachings are principally influenced by Advaita Vedanta, an orthodox philosophical system of Hinduism. It has a guru, Sri Vasudevananda Saraswati, who used the title Shankaracharya until 2017. The organisation has been the subject of controversy, especially historical child abuse that it confirmed was criminal. It has been described as a cult, sect or new religious movement.
Fred Emanuel Foldvary was a lecturer in economics at San Jose State University, California, and a research fellow at The Independent Institute. He previously taught at Santa Clara University and other colleges. He was also a commentator and senior editor for the online journal The Progress Report and an associate editor of the online journal Econ Journal Watch. He served on the board of directors for the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation.
Who's Who in British History is a multi-volume work composed of:
Andrew MacLaren was a British politician who represented Burslem as a Member of Parliament for three separate terms during the 20th century. A member of the Labour Party and Independent Labour Party, his passions were economic justice and art. He persistently campaigned for Land Value Taxation, founding the School of Philosophy and Economic Science to advocate for the policy. He was also a painter.
Leon MacLaren, born Leonardo da Vinci MacLaren, was a British philosopher and the founder of the School of Economic Science (SES). MacLaren was inspired by Henry George, Socrates, Dr Francis Roles, Pyotr Ouspensky, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and finally the philosophy of Advaita Vedānta through the Shankaracharyas of Jyoti Math.
Michael Hudson is an American economist, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, former Wall Street analyst, political consultant, commentator and journalist. He is a contributor to The Hudson Report, a weekly economic and financial news podcast produced by Left Out.
The Corruption of Economics is a 1994 book by Mason Gaffney and Fred Harrison, containing a critique of neoclassical economics and an account of the alleged suppression of the economic ideas of Henry George.
