What poor people need…

…is access to land.  Henry George noted that in the 19th century, and here’s Harold Henderson reviewing Sudhir Venkatesh’s new book:

what “James Arleander” needs is a piece of alley to do his off-the-books car repair, something he’s not going to find in a squeaky-clean mixed-income community.

Exactly.  Every kind of economic activity requires land, and if you can’t get the use of any you can’t produce anything.

From this review and others I’ve seen, the book seems to go way beyond the land issue, telling us, first, something about the “underground” economy by which many folks support themselves, and second, some of the reasons why it really isn’t a good thing that they must do so.

Yeah, I’d like to read the actual book, but it seems that the entire Chicago Public Library system has only one copy, and Amazon says it’ll be 4-6 weeks before they can deliver it.

"Intellectual Property" abuse…

…can have fatal results. Another example occurred in Chicago Friday, when a man who apparently expected great wealth to result from his idea decided he’d been ripped off by his patent lawyer. The AP article implies that the “idea” wasn’t worth much, but wouldn’t disasters like this be avoided if nobody expected to become wealthy just by monopolizing an idea?

Librarian help needed

So here at the Henry George School, we have piles of books in no particular order. Let’s record them in a spreadsheet, attach call numbers from the Library of Congress, and shelve them in sequence. They’ll be arranged more or less by subject, we’ll know what we have and where it is.

Ah, that assumes that every book is in the Library of Congress or, at least, has a unique Library of Congress call number. Not so! For instance,

Harry Gunnison Brown’s Fiscal Policy, Taxation, and Free Enterprise. We have the [undated] Robert Schalkenbach Foundation edition. The Library of Congress has no book by this title. But there are copies of the 1946 Lucas Brothers edition at five libraries:

Iowa State University uses the call number HJ2305 B813f

University of Kansas uses HC106 .B76, as does Northern Michigan University

At U of Missouri Columbia it’s HJ257.2 .B7 1946

and Reed College say’s it’s HB236.U5 .B8

OK, so maybe Library Science is no more of a science than, say, Economics, but can’t you guys agree on a call number for a published book. What should us amateurs do? Do we have to look at every Worldcat library and count the votes? What if it’s a tie?

   

America's top mayor uses the land tax

Harrisburg (PA) Mayor Steve Reed came in third in the world-wide “Outstanding Mayor” poll, but was the highest-scoring American.  Under Reed, Harrisburg adopted an increased land tax (the term in Pennsylvania is “split-rate tax”) which he credits as important in the revitalization of the City.

He enthusiastically took the opportunity of Pennsylvania local property tax reforms to apply a split rate valuation.This has been attacked by extreme conservatives and Reed has been high profile in answering them. He says “ in our central business district, for example, our two-tiered tax rate policy has specifically encouraged vertical development as opposed to low rise or horizontal development that seems to permeate suburban communities and which utilizes much more land than is necessary.” He says “ nine out of ten property owners gain from the system if compared directly with the single rate system in use in most municipalities in the state.”

Worldwide winner John So of Melbourne, Australia, also benefited from the land tax.

Chicago Mayor Richard M Daley was not one of the fifty finalists in the contest.

Enron as a musical comedy

A musical comedy based on the Enron collapse apparently is rather successful in Houston.  The author says he sought historical accuracy, spending as much as 100 hours on one song. (The music apparently isn’t original, but the words are).   “between the singing and dancing, characters often explain how arcane off-book partnerships, deregulation and energy trading came into play at Enron.” One could probably use a similar approach to provide a Georgist perspective on economic issues, but one would need to be a talented writer able to get some press coverage.

Thanks to Chicago Tribune, who doubtless will hide the story after several days so here are some other links.

Georgist political cartoons?

I haven’t used political cartoons in any Henry George School publication or promotion, because I didn’t want to get involved in any licensing issues.  Certainly cartoonists are entitled to compensation for their products, but I figured what with all the production taxes and other overhead we wouldn’t be able to afford it.

But today I located PoliticalCartoons.com, where we apparently can license a cartoon for our web site or printed use at prices in the range of $10 to $20.  This is affordable even to us.  Now the only problem, and it turns out to be a challenge, is to find a Georgist cartoon.

Land in the virtual world

The Law of Rent predates Henry George, but it was George who first pointed out that with the growth of cities particular lands gain value just because of the surrounding community.

As it turns out, things work pretty much the same way in the “Second Life” virtual world as in the physical one:

Land owners often pay people to hang around their parcel. This increases traffic at their business and consequently increases their rank in Second Life’s search engine.

From Recursive Instruments.

Is this why gov't can't "solve" the "affordable housing shortage?"

All ecosystems, including financial ones, start out simple and become more complex. For governments working in affordable housing this is exasperating; no sooner is one initiative added to the repertoire than another market niche appears, another funding gap arises, another stakeholder group presses a valid claim. Government is constantly hoping or the universal programme that can simply be created and then funded increasingly hereafter, but this is impossible because ecosystemic complexity continuously increases.

So says David Smith, “founder of the American Affordable Housing Institute and a leading expert on international housing markets,” in a paper for the [apparently unrelated] Smith Institute.

The AAHI no longer exists (though there is a sort of successor here.)  So I’m not sure where to ask the question: Have you considered the elimination of taxes on housing, and all other useful products of labor, as a way to address the problem?  Why wouldn’t that provide a permanent solution?