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
Category Archives: Top Ten Lists
The Top Ten Problems with “Corporate Personhood”
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
The Top Ten Solutions to Unemployment
By Gavin Putland
PROBLEM: Because of taxes on working and hiring, it costs employers $9 to pay workers $8, of which the workers keep $7 to spend on employers’ products now or later. So how can employers afford to hire more workers? Continue reading
Top 10: We Don’t Need a Precise Tally of National Rent
10. The figures are gathered and kept by people who use different definitions. To quantify rent in the classical sense, we’d have to decode published figures, using controversial methods.
The Top Ten Reasons Why the Georgist Remedy is Not a Tax
by Daniel Syddall
10. Taxes are arbitrary. Land dues are not arbitrary.
9. Taxes are unjustified. Land dues are the fulfillment of justice.
8. Taxes add cost. Land rent is always paid anyway, so land dues prevent private appropriation, reducing land costs.
7. Taxes are inimical to property rights. Land dues are essential for property rights.
6. Taxes create inefficiency, by imposing deadweight loss. Land dues raise efficiency, by reducing deadweight loss. Continue reading
The Top Ten Obvious Facts for Georgists
10. Wage Rates Don’t Depend on Productivity.
We hear a lot about lifting oneself by one’s own bootstraps — but that can’t be done unless there’s a pool of poor saps to lift oneself above. Education and training can help an individual to compete — but competition, of abundant workers for scarce jobs, drives wages down even while overall productivity increases.
9. Technological Progress Reduces the Value of Products.
Look at today’s low prices for a microwave oven, a gigabyte of digital memory, a dress shirt or a car that gets 35 mpg and goes from 0 to 60 in seven seconds. We just can’t blame our eroding standard of living on the prices of the goods we buy.
8. Land Is Not Produced by Labor.
It just isn’t, and that makes land fundamentally different from things that are produced by labor. Economists have tried and failed to get around this fact, in many complex and convoluted ways, for a century. Continue reading