Would Henry George’s ‘Remedy’ help us combat today’s global crises?
In Progress and Poverty Henry George sought the ‘cause of industrial depressions and the increase of want with the increase of wealth’ and offered a ‘remedy’ which remains as relevant to the problems of poverty and inequality we face today, as when he first wrote, but it also opens a new way of dealing with
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Tax Reform needed to avoid another spectacular crash
This week marks the 10th anniversary of the event that triggered the 2007/8 crisis and the ensuing Great Recession. But it need not have happened. In November 1997 Fred Harrison, author of Boom Bust and The Power in the Land, wrote to Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Press Secretary, Alistair Campbell, to warn them
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The People’s Budget
In his first budget the Chancellor of the Exchequer had the opportunity to set a course for Britain’s prosperity post Brexit and to help Mrs May achieve her goal of making Britain a country that works for everyone, while reducing the budget deficit. Instead the measures he proposed caused a storm of protest. Raising the
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A History of Land-Value Taxation in New Zealand
New Zealand holds a rather special status in that it was notably the first country to introduce a system of land-value taxation for raising revenue. This essay, by Ian Hopton, traces the fortunes of Land-Value Taxation (LVT) in New Zealand from its beginnings in 1849, some 30 years before Henry George published Progress and Poverty,
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The Law of Rent: The Concept
In the five or six years the Ethical Economics blog site has been in existence, the most regularly visited blog has been ‘The Law of Rent – the concept’. Hardly a month has gone by without at least six visits, but in May this year there were an astonishing 112 visits. What is the Law
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The tragedy of poverty
You have to be pretty desperate to set yourself alight, as a young vegetable seller in Tunisia did in 2010, sparking the Arab Spring which has brought so much hardship in the Arab world, and now onto the shores of Europe. Tunisia itself seemed to offer a glimmer of hope that it had not all
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South Africa belongs to all who live in it
In a review of Our Land, Our Rent, Our Jobs in the latest issue of Land & Liberty Fred Harrison pointed out that ‘according to conventional wisdom, South Africa has erased all traces of apartheid. How could it be otherwise, in the land of Nelson Mandela? When it came to power, the ANC resolved –
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Is economic rent sufficient to fund a modern state?
‘At the end of the nineteenth century’, wrote the former Governor of the Bank of England, (The British Tax System, Mervyn King and John Kay, OUP, 1990 5th ed.) ‘a movement led by Henry George argued, vigorously, that … land should be the principal tax base. This tradition still survives, although it is apparent that
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