Purpose – A tax based on land value is in many ways ideal, but many economists dismiss it by assuming it could not raise enough revenue. Standard sources of data omit much of the potential tax base, and undervalue what they do measure. The purpose of this paper is to present more comprehensive...

World lenders have dismissed warnings from credit rating firms and kept buying and holding U.S. Treasuries for security. The likely reason is that our tax system is stronger than Europe's. The major difference is that Europe has come to rely heavily on VATs, while the U.S. stands alone in not...

Anderson establishes the reality of an 18-year cycle in real estate prices, 1800 to date, emphasizing the land element, mainly urban land and subsoil resources. He relates this to privatization, which he calls “enclosureâ€, although he does not trace the history back to the 16th Century...

Construction is not the best use of capital when the objective is to make jobs, and loanable funds are scarce. Construction is more capital-intensive than labor-intensive. In addition, we presently have a glut of finished but unused buildings, the result of years of fiscal bias that has diverted...

Taxes or rental charges for water use are bearable and legal and would spur water economy, but the following fallacies impede acceptance of these ideas: (i) water rights are real property, (ii) a charge on water would be passed on to consumers, (iii) the cost of water is just its development...

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...