by Fred Harrison and Mason Gaffney, 2016, Land Research Trust. Review by Lindy Davies
I picked up Beyond Brexit: The Blueprint without great enthusiasm — but I’m happy to say I found it very impressive: an entirely worthwhile read. However, I’m afraid this review must begin with a couple of caveats. Continue reading
We thought this might be an opportune time to check in with the eminently sane Prof. Mason Gaffney at his home in Redlands, California. The author of The Corruption of Economics, After the Crash: Designing a Depression-Free Economy and The Mason Gaffney Reader (as well as hundreds of published papers and articles: see masongaffney.org )has slowed down a little, perhaps, but not awfully much. Continue reading
Comments by Bill Batt on Rent Unmasked: Essays in Honour of Mason Gaffney, Edited by Fred Harrison, Shepheard-Walwyn, 2016
Rent Unmasked, the newly published Mason Gaffney Festschrift volume, includes the thinking of many Georgist experts, showing the breadth that Gaffney’s work inspired. Continue reading
by Mason Gaffney
From about 1890-1930 many cities in the four Provinces of Western Canada chose to attract people and capital by a simple tax device: raising the property tax rate on land to support public services while lowering tax rates on capital, labor, sales, and production and trade generally. Vancouver quintupled its population from 1890-1900, far outpacing US cities, even on the booming Pacific Coast. Continue reading
by Mason Gaffney
1. Improved allocation is free lunch. The “win-win” deal, if real, is a free lunch. (That’s why trade, when it is uncoerced, yields such strong benefits.) Continue reading
by Mason Gaffney (adapted by Lindy Davies)*
Remember when market economics “triumphed” over socialism? Since then, it has exhibited more than enough failures to temper our hubris. Continue reading
by Mason Gaffney (condensed by Lindy Davies)
Edwin Cannan (1861-1935) was a professor at the London School of Economics, 1907-26, although a large inherited fortune let him live and rub elbows at Oxford, which he seemed to prefer. In 1907 Cannan fired off a round at local rating (taxation) of site values, pointing Continue reading
by Mason Gaffney
“The basis of allocating loans is not marginal productivity but collateral security” — Rainer Schikele
Henry George likened the aggregate effects of land speculation to those of a cartel of landowners. What do cartels do? They control enough of a resource to affect price, and withhold part of the resource from use, or from its full and best use. Formal cartels do this consciously. Herbert Hoover called it “Associationism,” and fostered his “Associations” which he evidently thought were good for the economy and the country. Continue reading
1. Corporations never die, never pay estate taxes, never divide their wealth among succeeding generations. In this they resemble medieval Churches that agglomerated over many years so much land they threatened the state itself. Continue reading
by Mason Gaffney
On Jan. 21, 2010 our High Court shocked Americans by ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission that a corporation may contribute unlimited funds advertising its views for and against political candidates. Continue reading