By Dr. Gavin R. Putland (revised June 12, 2003) In response to A Vision of Sustainable Transport in Queensland (Queensland Greens, February 2003) Summary Any new public transport service increases property values (or, more precisely, land values) along the route. The total increase in land values is consistently much larger than the fixed cost of [...]
It is suspected that the author is Mark Twain Suppose I am the owner of an estate and 100 slaves, all the land about being held in the same way by people of the same class as myself. It is a profitable business, but there are many expenses and annoyances attached to it. I must [...]
By Fred E. Foldvary, Senior Editor, The Progress Report The daily cyberzine at http://www.progress.org/ A man was walking down a shopping street and came to a store window where there was a big drawing full of lines and squiggles. A sign by the drawing asked, “Can you see the picture?” All the man could see [...]
A New Route to Social Equity: Henry George and the Science of Geonomics Caspar Davis Throughout the modern era there has been a near-constant struggle between the principles of social justice expressed by eighteenth century writers like Tom Paine and even Adam Smith, and the desire of the rich to monopolize both wealth and power. [...]
By Winston Churchill Speech given to the House of Commons Land monopoly is not the only monopoly, but it is by far the greatest of monopolies – it is a perpetual monopoly, and it is the mother of all other forms of monopoly. Unearned increments in land are not the only form of unearned or [...]
By Clyde Cameron, AO Taken from a recent edition of the Progess magazine Editor: I recently received a gracious letter from the Hon. Clyde Cameron A.O. in which he offers for publication a long letter he wrote to a Queensland academic researching the roots of the Aust. Labor Party. In it, Clyde lays out in [...]
By Mason Gaffney, Economics Professor, University of California, Riverside “Don’t you know that if people could bottle the air, they would? … there would be an American Air-Bottling Association… they would let millions die for want of breath, if they could not pay for the air.” — Robert G. Ingersoll Times have caught up with [...]
Since the Howard government gained control of the Senate, we have been hearing numerous proposals for reducing the top marginal rate of income tax. The excuse is that high marginal rates reduce the incentive for wealth creation and encourage tax minimization. Let’s put this excuse to the test. A holding tax is a tax of [...]
SPIN: The Family Home is exempt from land tax. (And all the people shall say: Amen.) FACT: If home buyers don’t have to pay land tax, they can afford higher mortgage repayments, hence higher prices. While the price of a house is limited by the cost of construction and by competition among builders, a home [...]
The Howard government’s industrial relations agenda attacks the wages and conditions of workers as if this were the only way to reduce the cost of hiring. What about the administrative costs imposed by government? For example: If you become an employer, you must also become a tax collector and tax agent, deducting and remitting pay-as-you-earn [...]