William Spencer Vickrey was a Canadian-American professor of economics and Nobel Laureate. Vickrey was awarded the 1996 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with James Mirrlees for their research into the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information, becoming the only Nobel laureate born in British Columbia.
A land value tax (LVT) is a levy on the value of land without regard to buildings, personal property and other improvements upon it. It is also known as a location value tax, a point valuation tax, a site valuation tax, split rate tax, or a site-value rating.
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 in excess of the cost needed to bring that factor into production. 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.
Georgism, also called in modern times Geoism, and known historically as the single tax movement, is an economic ideology holding that, although people should own the value that they produce themselves, 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.
John Rogers Commons was an American institutional economist, Georgist, progressive and labor historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
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.
Spencer Heath was an American engineer, attorney, inventor, manufacturer, horticulturist, poet, philosopher of science and social thinker. A dissenter from the prevailing Georgist views, he pioneered the theory of proprietary governance and community in his book Citadel, Market and Altar. His grandson, Spencer Heath MacCallum, popularized and expounded on his ideas, most notably in his book The Art of Community.
Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy is an 1879 book by social theorist and economist Henry George. It is a treatise on the questions of why poverty accompanies economic and technological progress and why economies exhibit a tendency toward cyclical boom and bust. George uses history and deductive logic to argue for a radical solution focusing on the capture of economic rent from natural resource and land titles.
Maximilian Hirsch was a German-born businessman and economist who settled in Melbourne, Australia, where he became the recognized intellectual leader of the Australian Georgist movement and, briefly, a member of the Victorian Parliament.
The Henry George theorem states that under certain conditions, aggregate spending by government on public goods will increase aggregate rent based on land value more than that amount, with the benefit of the last marginal investment equaling its cost. The theory is named for 19th century U.S. political economist and activist Henry George.
Louis Freeland Post was a prominent Georgist and the Assistant United States Secretary of Labor during the closing year of the Wilson administration, the period of the Palmer Raids and the First Red Scare, where he had responsibility for the Bureau of Immigration. Post considered the process to be a witch hunt and is credited with preventing many deportations and freeing many innocent people.
Prosper Australia is a non-profit association incorporated in the State of Victoria, Australia dedicated to reforming taxes onto land as articulated by Adam Smith, the Physiocrats, John Stuart Mill, and most notably by Henry George in Progress and Poverty.
Harry Gunnison Brown was a Georgist economist teaching at Yale in the early 20th century. Paul Samuelson named Brown in a list of "American saints in economics" that included only 6 other economists born after 1860.
The American Journal of Economics and Sociology is a peer-reviewed academic journal established in 1941 by Will Lissner with support from the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation. The purpose of the journal was to create a forum for continuing discussion of the issues raised by Henry George, a political economist, social philosopher, and political activist of the late 19th century. The editor-in-chief is Clifford W. Cobb.
Protection or Free Trade is a book published in 1886 by the economist and social philosopher, Henry George. Its sub-title is An Examination of the Tariff Question with Especial Regard to the Interests of Labor. As the title suggests, George examined the debate between protectionism and free trade.
Anna George de Mille (1878–1947) was an American feminist and Georgism advocate. She was the mother of Agnes George de Mille.
The United Labor Party was a short-lived alliance of 115 different labor unions and labor parties including the Central Labor Union, Knights of Labor, and the Socialist Labor Party. It was formed as a response of the rising "red scare" following the Haymarket Affair. After the formation of the party, the party leaders reached out to Henry George, who was sympathetic enough to labor to run under a labor banner but also educated enough to be a viable candidate, who eventually agreed to run for the United Labor Party after seeing 36,000 signatures in support of him. The party ran for the New York City mayoral position in 1886 with the candidate Henry George, who ended in second, ahead of Republican Candidate Theodore Roosevelt and behind the Democratic Candidate Abram Hewitt. The Party also had an unsuccessful attempt to run in the 1887 Philadelphia mayoral election with the candidate Tomas Phillips. After the two elections, there was heavy conflict between the Georgist faction of the party and the Socialist faction of the party, eventually ending in a Georgist-Socialist split in 1887, which effectively ended the alliance.
The National Reform Association was an American radical reformist political organization, founded in 1844 by radicals George Henry Evans, Thomas Ainge Devyr, John Windt and others with the aim of lobbying Congress to pass a wide range of land reforms. The NRA campaigned with the slogan "Vote Yourself a Farm", and the organization managed to achieve a wave of 55,000 petitions from Americans calling on Congress to open up free public lands to homesteaders, which lead to the successful Homestead Act of 1862.
On November 7, 1990, an open letter to then President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev was published and signed by a rank of thirty Western sources, most of whom were academics. The contents of the letter made the argument to the Soviet head of state that while moving the economy away from a centrally planned system towards a free market mixed economy was a step forward, they warned the leader against following through with the West had done following the end of feudalism; privatising the land itself, instead opting towards a Georgist system of common ownership and the collection of public revenue through land-value taxation. Nobel prize-winners Franco Modigliani, James Tobin, Robert Solow and William Vickrey were among the letter's signees.
