Most of us would say, if asked, that he who works should keep the fruits of his labors, and that if there is a revenue source for public spending that does not take from the person who works his wages or that which he produced, such a source would be a good idea.

Most of us would also endorse the idea that a system which puts in the pocket of those who don't work the fruits of the labors of others who do work is probably not a just system. If you asked them for an example, though, they might point to welfare payments to those unable to support themselves, but they probably wouldn't recognize the kinds of privilege we give to landholders — to pocket as if it were rightly theirs the rental value of land which few if any could claim to have created; to corporations we gift with subsidies and other kinds of corporate welfare.

Land Value Taxation's goal is to collect for the commons that which rightly belongs to the commons, while leaving in private pockets that which is legitimately private property. It makes finer distinctions than most of us regularly make. But our conflation of land and capital allows so-called capitalists to pocket for themselves the value of land, which rightly belongs to the commons.

Does this mean we advocate socialism? Hardly. To the contrary, we seek something far more just: we seek free market capitalism.

H.G. Brown: Significant Paragraphs from Henry George's Progress & Poverty: 13 Effect of Remedy Upon Social Ideals (in the unabridged P&P: Part IX: Effects of the Remedy — 4. Of the changes that would be wrought in social organization and social life

Shortsighted is the philosophy which counts on selfishness as the master motive of human action. It is blind to facts of which the world is full. It sees not the present, and reads not the past aright. If you would move men to action, to what shall you appeal? Not to their pockets, but to their patriotism; not to selfishness, but to sympathy. Self-interest is, as it were, a mechanical force — potent, it is true; capable of large and wide results. But there is in human nature what may be likened to a chemical force; which melts and fuses and overwhelms; to which nothing seems impossible. "All that a man hath will he give for his life" — that is self-interest. But in loyalty to higher impulses men will give even life. ...

To remove want and the fear of want, to give to all classes leisure, and comfort, and independence, the decencies and refinements of life, the opportunities of mental and moral development, would be like turning water into a desert. The sterile waste would clothe itself with verdure, and the barren places where life seemed banned would ere long be dappled with the shade of trees and musical with the song of birds. Talents now hidden, virtues unsuspected, would come forth to make human life richer, fuller, happier, nobler. For

• in these round men who are stuck into three-cornered holes, and three-cornered men who are jammed into round holes;
• in these men who are wasting their energies in the scramble to be rich;
• in these who in factories are turned into machines, or are chained by necessity to bench or plow;
• in these children who are growing up in squalor, and vice, and ignorance, are powers of the highest order, talents the most splendid.

They need but the opportunity to bring them forth.

Consider the possibilities of a state of society that gave that opportunity to all. Let imagination fill out the picture; its colors grow too bright for words to paint.

• Consider the moral elevation, the intellectual activity, the social life.
• Consider how by a thousand actions and interactions the members of every community are linked together, and how in the present condition of things even the fortunate few who stand upon the apex of the social pyramid must suffer, though they know it not, from the want, ignorance, and degradation that are underneath.
• Consider these things and then say whether the change I propose would not be for the benefit of every one — even the greatest landholder? ... read the whole chapter

Kris Feder: Progress and Poverty Today

In short, an unjust system of privileges and entitlements tends to cause misallocation of resources, macroeconomic instability and stagnation, political corruption, and social conflict that ultimately may threaten whole civilizations.

Nic Tideman: The Constitutional Conflict Between Protecting Expectations and Moral Evolution

The main point of this paper is simple. Unless the process that generates a constitution is perfect, there should be provision for the possibility of changing the constitution. It is true that the stability provided by constitutions is valuable. By limiting the opportunities for transient majorities to redistribute, constitutions protect property rights. The resulting stability promotes efficiency by reducing rent-seeking. But as valuable as stability is, it is not lexically more valuable than the chance to incorporate new moral understandings into a constitution. And when a society perceives the need to incorporate a new moral understanding into its constitution, a disappointment of pre-existing expectations is likely to be necessary. ... read the whole article

Joseph Stiglitz: October, 2002, interview

Q: Your academic work led you to formulate what you called "The Henry George Theorem." This demonstrated that public spending — where this was efficient — generated additional rental value that surfaced in the land market. Other distinguished scholars, such as the late Nobel prize winner, William Vickrey, confirmed your findings. You also noted in one of your books, co-written with Anthony Atkinson, that the Henry George Theorem was attractive both because it was the revenue-raiser that did not distort private incentives and because "it is the 'single tax' required to finance the public good." [Anthony B. Atkinson & Joseph E. Stiglitz, Lectures on Public Economics, London: McGraw-Hill, 1980, p. 525] Now, public investment, unless of the wasteful kind designed to serve the privileged interests of rent seekers (the classic type being a land speculator), should be viewed as working in partnership with the private sector and not a drain on the community. How can the reputation of publicly provided services and investments be rescued?

JES: That's a very good question. What we did when I was at the Council of Economic Advisors was some studies to try to show what the social returns would be to public investment in R&D, etc. And we became convinced that the rates of return of those investments are very high. So you ask the question, "what can we do to restore confidence in public investment?" We need to realize how much we depend on them. I keep telling people, "The Internet." That's one example. It was publicly funded. It's now a public-private partnership. The government did the basic research, and the private sector ran off with it. But, arguably, we would never have had the Internet if it were not for government expenditure. So I think a major industry in the United States — biotech — is based on NIH (National Institutes of Health). NIH does all the basic research. ... read the entire interview

Karl Williams:  Social Justice In Australia: INTERMEDIATE KIT

• To tackle traffic congestion, governments often limit the number of taxis by issuing licences.
• Because transmission bandwidths are limited (and sometimes because of political influence), a limited number of TV operating licences is issued.
• To prevent overfishing, fishing licences are issued.

There is an important virtue of conservatism. This is that it eliminates the waste of resources in fighting over who has what rights, the waste from what economists call rent-seeking. Furthermore, there will be some situations where there is no time to secure agreement on anything other than the status quo. Thus there is reason to have at least some element of conservatism in the procedures by which disputes are resolved. But conservatism cannot be the ultimate rule of a just society. It would perpetuate slavery, the selling of daughters as brides, racial and sexual inequalities in civil rights, and every other historical injustice that, through our moral evolution, we have overcome. The neutrality of Conservatism is superficial. Conservatism cannot claim to offer either the evenhandedness that the blindfold promises or the equality that scales require. ...Read the entire article

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. ...

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 US 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. ...  Read the whole article

• libertarian ideals (non-intrusive tax systems),
• effective Third World Aid,
• an end to tax evasion,
• contributions to world peace, and
• an end to boom & bust cycles.

Anti-governmentalists often identify any tax policy with public extravagance. Georgist tax policies, on the contrary, help save public funds in at least two general ways.

a. Putting the unemployed to work saves many public costs, like welfare, obviously, crime-fighting, and, ultimately, putting down civil disturbances and insurrections.

b. Putting the unemployed to work also raises demand and, by so doing, helps make plain to all the desirability of unleashing supply. Now, supply in some industries is deliberately held down to support prices. U.S. agriculture is a good example: supply restraints are transparent because they are matters of public law. The U.S.D.A. pays landowners to fallow some 60 million acres each year, to raise food and clothing prices. Under Georgist policy those acres would go to work producing food and paying taxes, both.

c. Georgist policies obviate subeconomic extensions of public works, which now are pushed by the powerful combination of land speculators seeking increments, the jobless seeking work, and the homeless seeking shelter. Georgist policies open up the naturally better land to settlement, thus relieving the pressure to invade flood plains, steep erosive slopes, flammable brushlands, wetlands, and other places that soak up heavy public funds to reach, develop, service, and protect.

At the same time, these policies deflate the "rent-seeking" motivations of land speculators to sue for state and federal aid. Under George's scheme, the unearned increments secured by "rent-seeking" lobbying for public works would be taxed away.

In the longer run it seems reasonable to expect that more genuine productive job opportunities at home would reduce the pressures for military spending, at least those portions which are strictly boondoggling of a make-jobs nature.... read the whole article

Ed Clarke: Geoisim and the Practice of Public Economics

see also: http://www.edcnews.se/Research/RentSeeking.html