Suchergebnisse

Henry George described his proposal to tax land rent as tantamount to abolition of the private ownership of land. However, Pullen's suggestion that it might better be described as "conditional, modified, or restricted ownership" falls foul of the fact that all ownership is conditional, modified, or restricted in some sense. Whereas, for George, the private ownership of labor products may be positivelyjustified on grounds of equity, and is subject only to conditions that apply to ownership in general, the private ownership of land may be permitted, but only on grounds of social utility, and only if a radical condition (social appropriation of most of its rent) is met that satisfies the demands of equity.

On a given site, some increments of rent or land value may reflect improvements by the owner, either to it or to adjacent sites he or she also owns. Because these increments cannot always be distinguished with precision from the value arising from natural features and/or from improvements due to communal efforts, F. A. Hayek dismissed the Georgist paradigm as fatally flawed. This paper disputes Hayek's criticism on the following grounds: 1. As Professor Backhaus observed, the degree of certainty in measurement demanded by Hayek is more rigorous than that required in practice for enforceable tax assessment. 2. Under a Georgist‐style system, landowners who improve their land would, in any case, get to keep much more of the fruits of their efforts than under any alternative public revenue system. 3. The distinction between value produced by the owner, on the one hand, and that produced by nature and society, on the other, remains authoritative as an ideal even if not perfectly realizable in practice; hence, there is a sense in which even the theoretical elegance of Georgism is not undercut by Hayek's criticism.