Most economists today live in a two-factor world: There is just labor and capital. Land, so central to classical political economy, has been swallowed into capital and "disappeared." This paper surveys some of the better historical treatments of land and capital, their interrelations, and how...

The paper infers the biasing effects of taxes from their differential effects on the present values of rival uses for given tracts of land. After-tax wage rates, interest rates, and commodity prices are exogenous, hence not affected by taxes, which are therefore all shifted to land rents and...

The financial crisis of 2008-2009 has antecedents in earlier crises, including the Great Depression. In order to understand how the current crisis arose, we must review the most fundamental principles of banking. Doing that, we find that the main service performed by banks is the creation of...

Most forms of macroeconomics today, whether Keynesian or monetarist, presuppose that problems of economic instability can be treated as errors in financial management. Neither fiscal nor monetary policy recognizes the existence of systemic faults in the real economy that result in overinvestment...

It is widely recognized that the economic crisis of 2009 was caused by unsound lending for real estate. Largely ignored, however, is that this contraction was easily predicted on the basis of a well-established pattern of land speculation, premature subdivision, and excessive building on...