Nothing Like This Has Ever Happened Before – Gilded age in SF compared to today
The article is about (among other things) Henry George, and his ideas about a single land value tax being the best way to fund government.  Interestingly, modern economics is quite favourable to his ideas.  In particular, research on the economics of taxation has shown that land taxes are the most efficient taxes with the lowest deadweight losses.<p>And when it comes to actual economists, Krugman &quot;agrees that land value taxation is the best means of raising public revenue&quot;, but has questioned if it would raise enough; many other economists have suggested that it would.  Rothbard (a leading an-cap&#x2F;Austrian economist) attacked it, but I don&#x27;t think many people ever agreed with him.  Milton Friedman (a very widely respected economist of the Chicago school) said it was the &quot;least bad&quot; tax for raising government revenues.  Hayek (another Austrian and also a Nobel prize winner), was an early proponent but later feared it would be unfair in practice.  Robert Solow and Joseph Stiglitz are also on record as being in favour.  Some of George&#x27;s contemporaries suggested that distinguishing land from capital made no sense, but (as above) modern research has shown otherwise.<p>And Marx hated the idea, viewing it as &quot;Capitalism&#x27;s last ditch&quot;.  In other words, he was afraid it would work, and thus delay to inevitable onset of world socialism.  (I think on balance that should be counted as a vote in favour of Georgism?)<p>In short, it&#x27;s an idea supported by research and with the backing of a glittering array economists from the far left to the far right (including several winners of the Nobel prize), a few prominent politicans (Churchill in Britain and two US presidents), numerous jouranlists and pundits, etc.  And yet it&#x27;s never been tried.  (I don&#x27;t count the few experiments at the local government level, since national taxes still applied.)<p>Kind of odd.  Of course, it would be an enormous change to enact, which I suppose explains it.