Pierre Joseph Proudhon

Pierre Joseph Proudhon
(1809-1865)

Jeff Smith: What the Left Must Do: Share the Surplus

Buying a land title – the granddaddy of all privileges – typically requires a mortgage, which disguises rent as “interest”. Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), French journalist/anarchist, noted: "As long as land monopoly is maintained, the few can take possession of what Nature free of charge has granted to everyone, and usury will penetrate the whole society, and we will have banks, which instead of being servants for the exchange of goods will become powerful extorters." He called this one; today’s banks do bleed the economy. Read the whole article

Bill Batt: The Compatibility of Georgist Economics and Ecological Economics

... All society needed to do was to collect the economic rent from landholders as its rightful due, a solution that became part of the subtitle of his book, “the remedy.” Taxing the land (or, alternatively, collecting the economic rent) was something common citizens could understand.

They knew well the enormous disparity in fortune between the landed and the landless. They knew also that there was in fact land enough for all, except for a system of ownership that made no distinction between the right of land use and the right of land gain. George had no doubt read Frenchman P. J. Proudhon’s more strident pamphlet that “property is theft.” 33 He knew that there was a long tradition of land taxation, well articulated by a French school of philosophers known as the Physiocrats. It was a natural and comprehensible solution for him to advocate the adoption of the “single tax” on land, according to its market value, to collect the economic rent. ... read the whole article

Wealth and Want
... because democracy alone is not enough to produce widely shared prosperity.
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... because democracy alone hasn't yet led to a society in which all can prosper