Rent as Public Revenue: : Issues and Methods

How to Implement a Vital Economic Remedy As in the “Gilded Age,” in the 21st century we face the endemic problem of deepening poverty, even as productiv- ity keeps growing. The solution, Henry George wrote, is to “make land common property.” But how to do that? Not by redistributing the land itself — such “agrarian reform” efforts have repeat- edly failed. “It is not necessary to confiscate land,” George went on to say, “only to confiscate rent.” The value of land — which is due to the community’s activities and to nature itself — truly belongs to the whole community, and thus is the ideal fund for public revenue. But land, in economic terms, is far more than farms and fields, or the surface of the earth — it includes every kind of natural resource and opportunity.