Themes

• George says labor can only be exerted upon land, it is from land that matter that turns into wealth must be drawn, and capital is NOT a necessary factor in production
• Law of rent - rent is determined by the margin of production. How much you can produce from a particular piece of land compared to least productive alternative. Like lot B vs lot C.
• The land owner doesn’t rly contribute anything to production other than gatekeeping access to land
• Increasing production doesn’t necessarily lead to better economics for anyone but the landlord if the next best option is still the same price. See below

• This happens with population increase bc productivity grows exponentially. As labor’s productivity goes up, it makes it more worthwhile to develop on more marginal (less productive) land. Presence of other people gives value to the things you make with natural resources
• if you now a city is going to be a big city in 10 years, what’s the most economic thing to do? put in capital and develop a business? no. buy the land and sit on it. even though all the value is being developed on top of it and by people flocking to it
• Govt taxes of wealth has problems. It increases the size of the government and it also is a tax on productivity, which creates dead weight loss. Labor and capital can move, so if they don’t like your rate, they can go somewhere else. Note that land can’t do this.
• George proposed tax on the value of land, not the improvement. Property tax today is different and taxes the value of the improvement. LVT scares away speculators bc it means they get taxed on something they haven’t improved and thus are not generating income from. It also means you can’t just own land and live off of that. You need to actually improve it.
• Since no one produces land, it is the one thing you can tax without getting less of it

Raw Notes

Chapters 1-6

• Progress and Poverty by Henry George is basically the argument that Poverty and wealth disparity seem to be perversely linked with progress, the rent is too high, and it’s all bc of land.
• He believes land ownership and speculative rent is the cause of the problem and proposes a single land value tax.
• Capital is stored up production, set aside with the purpose of attaining more wealth (which is labor output that someone desires or pays for). Capital, like a tool or a factory, can be used to attain wealth. Human labor is not capital. The products of human labor become capital once they are used for the productive purpose of creating wealth
• Land is not wealth and it is not capital. This is central to George’s entire philosophy.
• Land is just nature. It is the source of all wealth but is not wealth itself. Land also includes the ocean and the sky. Anything in nature.
• Wages are not drawn from capital, as conventional thinking states. If I take a piece of leather and turn it into shoes, my wages are the shoes, the reward for my labor. The source of the wages is the labor for which they are paid. If you pay man to gather berries and eggs and pay him in a portion of the berries and eggs, the wages came from the labor. Capital wasn’t changed at all. And it doesn’t matter if you get paid in money or the underlying wealth (in this example, the berries and eggs), bc money is a direct claim on underlying wealth.