Liberty, Property, and the Land Value Tax

William S. Peirce

[18 June 2012. A Preliminary Draft prepared for the 2012 meetings of the History of Economics Society, 22-25 June, 2012, Brock University, St. Catherines, Ontario]

John Locke based his defense of property on the freedom of the individual to combine his own labor with freely available natural resources. Henry George and other philosophers and economists have considered the Land Value Tax to be a way to adapt Locke's argument to the realities of a world where land has an opportunity cost and yet to retain Locke's defense of man-made property. While some modern libertarian, or classical liberal, literature still retains its Locke-augmented-by-George roots, another stream of recent literature denies the distinction between natural resources and man-made property, arguing the injustice of taxing either. Sometimes the reference is to the writings of Frank Knight, and particularly his view of capital and his denigration of the concept of natural resources. Murray Rothbard's odd attack on the Single Tax has also been influential. This paper explores why many within the modern libertarian movement have rejected land value taxation.

I. Introduction

The words of John Locke are the starting point for the analysis of property by many in the classical liberal tradition:

26. God, who has given the world to men in common, has also given them reason to make use of it to the best advantage of life and convenience. The earth and all that is therein is given to men for the support and comfort of their being. And though all the fruits it naturally produces and beasts it feeds belong to mankind in common, as they are produced by the spontaneous hand of nature; and nobody has originally a private dominion exclusive of the rest of mankind in any of them, as they are thus in their natural state; yet, being given for the use of men, there must of necessity be a means to appropriate them some way or other before they can be of any use or at all beneficial to any particular man. The fruit or venison which nourishes the wild Indian, who knows no enclosure and is still a tenant in common, must be his, and so his, i.e., a part of him, that another can no longer have any right to it before it can do him any good for the support of his life.

27. Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person; this nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature has provided and left it in, he has mixed his own labor with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature has placed it in, it has by this labor something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men. For this labor being the unquestionable property of the laborer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough and as good left in common for others. (John Locke. 1690. The Second Treatise of Government).

This analysis has a powerful appeal for the situation where land is a free good. Locke, himself, noted that significant restriction in the famous closing phrase of the quote, "where there is enough and as good left in common for others." Although Locke tried to make the case that the world had enough good unclaimed land that men might enclose and homestead, few would try to argue that proposition today.

When land of a particular quality is no longer a free good, unregulated markets will readily generate annual rental rates for particular parcels, and those annual rents can readily be capitalized into sales prices for parcels that change hands and appraised values for parcels that do not. Land rents, like other prices, can serve to allocate inputs to their most productive uses. But beyond the neoclassical concern with efficient allocation of resources, some commentators steeped in the classical liberal tradition have maintained a concern for the distribution of wealth. Who benefits from production may be as important as how much is produced.

Locke constructs a persuasive argument that man owns himself and the fruits of his own labor when the land is free, but when the population has grown to the point where the parcel of land has multiple claimants; i.e., an opportunity cost, which is measured by the economic rent, who should receive that rent? Henry George(1879) argued that the rent should belong to society because it either measures the natural advantage of a parcel; e.g., superior fertility of soil or location on a natural trade route, or the efforts of other people; e.g., highways, ports, and other public infrastructure, the activities of neighbors that attract business to your block, and the growth of population of the community.

Economists who are friendly to the natural law approach of Locke but more influenced by the utilitarian underpinnings of much economic theory have also sometimes supported land value taxation (LVT) as "the least bad tax." To the extent that a tax on land value can replace taxes on work effort, sales, international trade, and accumulation of capital, the economy should become more productive, which should appeal to nearly everyone, even those not swept away by appeals to the justice of taxing land.

Despite the twin appeals to justice and to efficiency (not to mention the fact that the LVT is the only tax that can be used without damage by even the smallest local governments), the LVT has not been promoted by the Libertarian Party. Indeed, in some years the party platform has explicitly opposed it. Of course, political parties are alliances of individuals with many different interests, but a small party that calls itself "The Party of Principle" does not need to make compromises until it is in danger of winning elections.

The puzzle this paper attempts to resolve, therefore, is the path by which so much of the modern Libertarian Party became anti-LVT despite the substantial overlap of early singletaxers with classical liberals and the consistency of their respective philosophies. Much of this ground has been plowed before with slightly different emphases by Harold Kyriazi (2000) Libertarian Party at Sea on Land and Mason Gaffney (1994) "Neo-classical Economics as a Stratagem against Henry George." Kyriazi looks closely at developments within the Libertarian Party, while Gaffney, as suggested by the title, examines the negative reactions of the economics profession to LVT. Brian Doherty's (2007) compendium, Radicals for Capitalism, is an invaluable guide to the libertarian history and literature, old and new.

II. Henry George as a Classical Liberal

Henry George was often called a socialist by his enemies, and he was a radical by the etymological definition of attacking what he perceived to be the root of the problems of poverty and industrial crises. Nevertheless, his fundamental world view, as expressed in his view of the natural rights of man, how to secure those rights, the fallibility of man, and the limited capacity and role of government, mark him as a classical liberal. In "An Open Letter to Pope Leo XIII," George explained his remedy simply and directly:

We do not propose to assert equal rights to land by keeping land common, letting any one use any part of it at any time. We do not propose the task, impossible in the present state of society, of dividing land in equal shares; still less the yet more impossible task of keeping it so divided. We propose-leaving land in the private possession of individuals, with full liberty on their part to give, sell, or bequeath it-simply to levy on it for public uses a tax that shall equal the annual value of the land itself, irrespective of the use made of it or the improvements on it. And since this would provide amply for the need of public revenues, we would accompany this tax on land values with the repeal of all taxes now levied on the products and processes of industry-which taxes, since they take from the earnings of labor, we hold to be infringements of the right of property. (George. 1891. p.157)

Although George did advocate public ownership of franchised monopolies, such as the telegraph and utilities, he was eager to restrict or eliminate major expenditure programs:

To prevent government from becoming corrupt and tyrannous, its organization and methods should be as simple as possible, its functions be restricted to those necessary to the common welfare, and in all its parts it should be kept as close to the people and as directly within their control as may be.

The American Republic has no more need for its burlesque of a navy than a peaceable giant would have for a stuffed club or a tin sword. It is maintained only for the sake of its officers and the naval rings…. So, with our army. All we need, if we even now need that, is a small force of frontier police, such as is maintained in Australia and Canada. Standing navies and standing armies are inimical to the genius of democracy, and it ought to be our pride, as it is our duty, to show the world that a great republic can dispense with both. And in organization, as in principle, both our navy and our army are repugnant to the democratic idea. In both we maintain that distinction between commissioned officers and common soldiers and sailors which arose in Europe when the nobility who furnished the one were considered a superior race to the serfs and peasants who supplied the other. The whole system is an insult to democracy, and ought to be swept away. Our diplomatic system, too, is servilely copied from the usages of kings who plotted with each other against the liberties of the people, before the ocean steamship and the telegraph were invented. It serves no purpose save to reward unscrupulous politicians and corruptionists, and occasionally to demoralize a poet. To abolish it would save expense, corruption and national dignity. ….[O]ur statute books are full of enactments which could, with advantage, be swept away. It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly. (Social Problems.1883. pp.171-173).

From this brief sketch it would appear that a modern libertarian could live comfortably in a Georgist society, even though he would pay to the government the entire rent of the land he possesses and might send a check for gas, electricity, and water to the municipal utility via the national postal service. He would not have to pay taxes on man-made wealth or capital, income, sales, imports, or business activity.

III. Classical Liberals, Early Libertarians and the Land Value Tax

It would be a mistake to say that all single taxers were or are libertarians or that all libertarians were or are single taxers, but several key figures were important in both groups during the period before the formation of the modern Libertarian Party. The following list is by no means exhaustive:

Francis Neilson was a Liberal Party member of the British Parliament from 1910-1915 when he resigned because of his pacifist convictions and moved to the U.S. Among his several careers, he was an active Georgist and served on the editorial board of the American Journal of Economics and Sociology:

Economic freedom surely means freedom to use land, and the corollary is, man himself must use it, without the assistance of government. Give man economic freedom and he needs no politician to subsidize him, no matter how dominating his personality may be to a certain type of elector. Neilson. Man at The Crossroads, p.178).

I can remember the time when it was possible in this country to meet Radicals and Liberals in nearly all the important centers of every state. There were societies where one could speak on Paine and Jefferson, with the certainty that the audience would not only be interested but would understand what these men meant to America. There are few Radicals and Liberals in the country now. Most of them are to be found among the Georgists who promulgate the gospel of Progress and Poverty. (Neilson. "The Decay of Liberalism," Modern Man and the Liberal Arts, p.129).

Frank Chodorov taught at the Henry George School of New York and was later an editor of The Freeman:

Taxation Is Robbery. All history points to the economic purpose of political power. It is the effective instrument of exploitative practices. Generally speaking, the evolution of political exploitation follows a fixed pattern: hit-and-run robbery, regular tribute, slavery, rent-collections. In the final stage, and after long experience, rent-collections become the prime proceeds of exploitation and the political power necessary thereto is supported by levies on production. Centuries of accommodation have inured us to the business, custom and law have given it an aura of rectitude; the public appropriation of private property by way of taxation and the private appropriation of public property by way of rent collections become unquestioned institutions. They are of our mores.(Chodorov. 1962. p. 239)

Albert Jay Nock was a hero of the old right during the 1930s and an editor of the Freeman. He was also an advocate of the single tax:

After conquest and confiscation have been effected, and the State set up, its first concern is with the land. The State assumes the right of eminent domain over its territorial basis, whereby every landholder becomes in theory a tenant of the State. In its capacity as ultimate landlord, the State distributes the land among its beneficiaries on its own terms. A point to be observed in passing is that by the State-system of land-tenure each original transaction confers two distinct monopolies, entirely different in their nature, inasmuch as one concerns the right to labour-made property, and the other concerns the right to purely law-made property. The one is a monopoly of the use-value of land; and the other, a monopoly of the economic rent of land. The first gives the right to keep other persons from using the land in question, or trespassing on it, and to exclusive possession of values accruing from the application of labour to it; values, that is, which are produced by exercise of the economic means upon the particular property in question. Monopoly of economic rent, on the other hand, gives the exclusive right to values accruing from the desire of other persons to possess that property; values which take their rise irrespective of any exercise of the economic means on the part of the holder.

Bearing in mind that the State is the organization of the political means-that its primary intention is to enable the exploitation of one class by another-we see that it has always acted on the principle already cited, that expropriation must precede exploitation. There is no other way to make the political means effective. (Nock. 1935. pp.104-106)

E. C. Harwood strove to be an economic scientist, following the methodology developed by C.S. Peirce, John Dewey, and Arthur Bentley, rather than a partisan. He was, however, thoroughly imbued with the values of classical liberalism. Like George, he believed that freedom and justice are essential for economic and cultural progress. His support for LVT was expressed in publications such as "Why Create Slums?" (AIER, 1961). Although Harwood supported George's analysis of land, he did not consider it George's most important contribution:

In short, Henry George's greatest contribution is the development of his hypothesis concerning the effects of freedom and justice on the civilization cycle. [Bronislaw Malinowski later defined freedom thus:] "Men are free to the extent that the culture or society in which they live permits them to plan or choose their goals, provides equality of opportunity to act effectively in pursuit of those goals, and permits them to retain the fruits of their labors," but to Henry George belongs the credit for seeing clearly the significance of freedom and justice to civilization. He traced the rise and fall of the civilization cycle as no man had ever done before. He showed how the equitable distribution of currently produced wealth would nourish the individual capacities on which a healthy civilization depends just as the free circulation of blood in the human body nourishes the innumerable individual cells on which health and sanity depend. (AIER, 1952, p. 3)

As part of this great contribution that Harwood mentions, Henry George (Progress and Poverty, Book X, Ch.3) described the malevolent role of a process that a modern economist would describe as "rent seeking." This topic is revisited below.

IV. Geolibertarians and the Libertarian Party

The long tradition, sketched above, of classical liberals advocating land value taxation or of Georgists who are libertarian in their policy views certainly continues. But when Harold Kyriazi (2000) wrote Libertarian Party at Sea on Land, he was calling attention to a strong countermovement within libertarian circles. Among those who still combine the two traditions, the term "Geolibertarian," invented by Fred Foldvary, is commonly used. (Dan Sullivan maintains a geolibertarian website, http://geolib.com.) Foldvary is, of course, a professional economist of the Austrian school, as well as a geolibertarian. Nicolaus Tideman is a life-long proponent of LVT, as well as an economist in the classical liberal philosophic tradition.

The Libertarian Party, however, took a different turn. The platform for many years had these words or something very similar:

All rights are inextricably linked with property rights. Such rights as the freedom from involuntary servitude as well as the freedom of speech and the freedom of press are based on self-ownership. Our bodies are our property every bit as much as is justly acquired land or material objects. ...

We demand an end to the taxation of privately owned real property, which actually makes the State the owner of all lands and forces individuals to rent their homes and places of business from the State. (Libertarian Party Platform. 2002.Plank on "The Right to Property").

These passages were not in the 1972 platform, the first after the founding of the party and the meeting that Murray Rothbard boycotted (Doherty.2007. pp.392, 687) They appeared in the mid-1970s, apparently under the influence of Rothbard, who was on the platform committee then (Kyriazi, p.109).

The "Right to Property" plank appeared as recently as 2011, although it was not present in 2008 and 2010. It is not in the 2012 platform. However, the 2012 Presidential candidate, Gary Johnson, advocates replacing all existing Federal taxes with a massive sales tax (the "Fair Tax"). Fred Foldvary (2012) has protested this as a destruction of libertarian ideology and philosophy. Candidate Johnson's position, however, apparently has some popularity within the party. Many libertarians consider a sales tax to be "voluntary" because you can avoid it by dropping out of the market economy. A conventional economist would count that behavior as part of the "excess burden" of the sales tax. The fact that the LVT cannot be avoided accounts for both the economic efficiency of the tax and some of the popular hatred of it.

V. The Land Value Tax and Twentieth Century Economics

Murray Rothbard (1957a,b) was vehemently opposed to LVT. That would not be surprising if he had been a conventionally trained neo-classical economist-but he was not. He was an Austrian, one of the few American students of Mises. Yet in his opposition to LVT Rothbard leaned heavily on Frank Knight's diatribes, which invoked Knight's totally non-Austrian capital theory.

Mason Gaffney (1994) has documented the efforts by many leading neo-classical economists to belittle Henry George and suppress the single tax movement. Such luminaries as J.B. Clark and Frank Knight were strongly opposed to the single tax, but Rothbard's teacher, Mises, was not interested in government spending and did not say anything novel or interesting about taxes. One might have expected that Rothbard's Austrian education, as well as his admiration for Nock and Chodorov, would have inoculated him against the neo-classical attack. It did not.

As is usual in such exercises, the LVT is not compared with the taxes it would replace. It is assumed that other taxes are perfect or that they do not exist. If Rothbard were really playing the anarchist, however, he could simply shout "Taxation is Theft," without focusing on any particular tax. In fact, Rothbard recites the usual list of objections to LVT (1)Assessment is difficult. (2)Improvements are hard to separate from land value. (3)Forcing idle land into use would drain labor and capital away from their currently productive uses. (4)The site owner deserves a reward for his productive labor of allocating land to its best use. And then (5)since rent received by the landlord after tax would be zero, he would charge no rent with devastating consequences. In Rothbard's words:

Compelling any economic goods to be free wreaks economic havoc. Specifically, a 100 percent tax means that land sites pass from individual ownership into a state of no-ownership as their price is forced to zero. Since no income can be earned from the sites, people will treat the sites as if they were free-as if they were superabundant. But we know they are not superabundant; they are highly scarce. The result is to introduce complete chaos in land sites. Specifically, the very scarce locations-those in high demand-will no longer command a higher price than the poorer sites.

Therefore, the market will no longer be able to insure that these locations will go to the most efficient bidders. Instead, everyone will rush to grab the best locations. A wild stampede will ensue for the choice downtown urban locations, which will now be no more expensive than lots in the most dilapidated suburbs. There will be great overcrowding in the downtown areas and underuse of outlying areas. As in other types of price ceilings, favoritism and "queuing up" will settle allocation, instead of economic efficiency. In short, there will be land waste on a huge scale. Not only will there be no incentive for those in power to allocate the sites efficiently; there will also be no market rents and therefore no way that anyone could find out how to allocate sites properly.

In brief, the inevitable result of a single tax would be nothing less than locational chaos. And since location-land-must enter into the production of every good, chaos would be injected into every aspect of economic calculation. (Rothbard. 1957a. pp.298-299)

In response to Georgist criticisms, Rothbard concluded with a defense of "homesteading;" i.e., the Lockean position without the proviso that "enough and as good" land be available to others:

What I am advocating is appropriation of unused land by the first user-the "pioneer"-and I did not at all consider the problem of feudal land, which America fortunately escaped. I am no friend to feudal landownership based on conquest-but a discussion of this would have gotten us far afield. What I am arguing for in this essay is the ethical validity of absolute ownership by the pioneer and his heirs and assigns.(Rothbard. 1957b. p.309)

He did not repeat Frank Knight's assertion that, "…in real life, the original 'appropriation' of such opportunities by private owners involves investment in exploration, in detailed investigation and appraisal…--besides the cost of buying off or killing or driving off previous claimants" (Knight. 1924, pp. 167-168). Perhaps such costs could be fully amortized by the time that the statute of limitations on murdering Indians expires. It would seem, also, that stress on the rights of the appropriators of land might lead someone committed to equality of opportunity to think about inheritance taxes or the anarchist variant, possession by adverse occupancy (squatting) of underutilized property.

Knight was perhaps the most highly esteemed neo-classical theoretician devoted to bashing the single tax. The core of his argument has been analyzed by Plassmann and Tideman (2004). The problem is implicit in the above quote, but a more explicit statement (he repeated it many times) from his classic Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (1921) is as follows (with italics added): The classical economist treated land, or natural agents, as given in supply. This assumption was the basis for propounding a theory of rent different from the reasoning by which the other distributive shares were explained, and for positing a special relation between rent and cost. The definition given for land to make it fit the description of a fixed supply-the original and inexhaustible powers of the soil-is indeed drastic in its limitation. Later, this dogma of unconditional fixity of supply was made the basis for the single-tax propaganda. We cannot discuss this position at length, but must take space to remark quite briefly that it is utterly fallacious. It should be self-evident that when the discovery, appropriation, and development of new natural resources is an open, competitive game, there is unlikely to be any difference between the returns from resources put to this use and those put to any other. Moreover, any disparity which exists is either a result of chance and as likely to be in the favor of one field as the other, or else is due to some difference in psychological appeal between the fields; i.e., goes to offset some other difference in their net advantages. Viewing as a whole the historic process by which land is made available for productive employment, it must be said to be "produced"; i.e., to have its utility conferred upon it in a way quite on a par with that which holds for any other exchangeable good. (Knight.1921. pp. 159-160)

Plassmann and Tideman focus on the three terms italicized here, discovery, appropriation, and development. They point out that while discovery and development can be plausibly compared with the production of ordinary capital equipment-land must be explored, leveled, drained, etc.-appropriation is different. The individual will find it profitable to use resources to secure ownership of a parcel of land, but that expenditure does not increase the productive capacity of the economy. It simply determines which person receives the benefits. To use a modern term, it is "rent-seeking." It is equivalent to the expenditure of resources to obtain a tariff on your product or a loophole in the tax law, or using resources to capture a slave and shackle him. The Land Value Tax, by taxing away the returns from appropriation of land, would decrease the socially useless expenditure of resources on rent-seeking.

Although the "rent-seeking" term is relatively new, the concept is much older. Under the name of "privilege" it is at the core of both Henry George's argument for LVT and of his "Law of Human Progress:"

Mental power is, therefore, the motor of progress, and men tend to advance in proportion to the mental power expended in progression….the mental power which can be devoted to progress is only what is left after what is required for non-progressive purposes [maintenance and conflict]….By maintenance I mean, not only the support of existence, but the keeping up of the social condition and the holding of advances already gained. By conflict, I mean not only warfare and the preparation for warfare, but all expenditure of mental power in seeking the gratification of desire at the expense of others, and in resistance to such aggression. (George. 1879. p. 504)

It is interesting that Knight, in reviewing the theories of various socialists, recognized the error introduced by their failure to distinguish between productive capital and mere privilege. Knight paraphrases their error thus:

Capital is equivalent to property, which is to be regarded as mere power over the economic activities of others due to the strategic position of ownership over the implements of labor. It is analogous to a robber baron's crag, a toll-gate on a natural highway, or a political franchise to exploit (Knight. 1921. p. 28).

Would that he had recalled that crucial distinction between law-granted privilege and man-produced capital when he wrote about land!

Gochenour and Caplan (2012) have added a search-theoretic critique to the usual lists of the failings of LVT. From a libertarian perspective, however, their most frightening argument is that a full Single Tax; i.e., one that captures 100 percent of land rent for the State, would produce so much revenue that it could empower Leviathan to destroy whatever remains of our liberties. The ideal solution (from that perspective) would be to pay some or all of the proceeds directly in cash to the citizens. (For a discussion of how that has worked in Alaska, see Widerquist and Howard, 2012).

In their discussion of search, Gochenour and Caplan [GC] slip very quickly between mineral lands and urban lots. They also seem unwilling to acknowledge the substantial experience and institutions already in place for valuing and taxing real estate. It will be useful to start with the easy case of urban land. In all but the most depressed cities, land prices are readily determined by private appraisers or public tax assessors on the basis of market prices. The price, P, is the capitalized stream of rents, net of tax, expected by the market participants. If a particular developer (entrepreneur) is able through experience, intuition, or some formal search process to see that a particular parcel could yield more than the other participants in the market expect, he can buy it for the price other people think is appropriate, P, and then make a fortune if his insights are correct. The base for the land component of the current real estate tax and for the LVT is the stream of expected rents that yields the market price, P. That is also the opportunity cost of the land that the entrepreneur uses and thus precludes anyone else from using. The LVT would leave the returns on the building and the entrepreneurial profits untouched. Indeed, the government would not even know them because the LVT does not require any personal information except for the information on the land title; i.e., the address to send the bill.. An LVT that absorbed the entire rent would drive down P toward zero, but the buyer would know what his annual tax would be. That is why P approached zero. Fears of zero prices leading to chaos are simply ridiculous because they ignore the expected rents that the market has assigned to different parcels and that must be paid in annual taxes.

In equilibrium, of course, the developer would earn only the wages of management and the normal return on his own investment in man-made capital.. But equilibrium is not an Austrian concept and leaves no room for entrepreneurship or returns that exceed the market cost of inputs.

The more interesting case is that of the extractive industries, especially subsurface minerals. It is certainly correct to say that substantial search and research are required to convert chunks of the natural globe into reserves that can be extracted at an economically feasible cost. The main difficulties encountered in attempting to tax rents include the fact that no market price or accounting variable provides a direct way to estimate rent. Moreover, typically a number of parties (surface owner, mineral rights owner, mining company, various levels of government, and more) share the rents according to contracts signed long before full information is available. Governments could probably extract more in most situations without damaging incentives, but they are constrained by competition from other taxing jurisdictions. (See Peirce, 1984, 1989, and 1996 for interesting stories, analysis, and references.) In today's world, income and profits taxes capture some small part of rents. Switching to a single tax would involve some real challenges. It is too early to weep for the landowner (or the mining company) in this struggle.

Another theme that GC try to work is "Expectations, Time Inconsistency, and Regime Uncertainty." It is certainly true that some people will lose whenever the tax law is changed. Would active entrepreneurs suffer if the taxes were lifted from income, sales, corporate profits, payroll, machinery, inventories, and buildings and imposed on land value? The real losers at the moment of the change would be those who had just purchased parcels with a low ratio of buildings to land. They will regret not having waited until expectations of the impending LVT reduced prices. But assuming that they were planning to build something, they can look forward to lower total taxes in the future than they had expected when they made the decision to buy.

GC also mention the disastrous land reform by Idi Amin in Uganda and could have mentioned the equally irrelevant disaster perpetrated in Zimbabwe. The characteristic of George's approach is that it does not disturb security of tenure. It leaves each parcel in the hands of its current owner and taxes away only the land rent, not the returns to the owner's labor, management, or capital.

VI. Conclusion

The question this paper set out to answer is why the modern Libertarian Party has opposed the LVT so strongly, despite the overlap between singletaxers and the intellectual forerunners of the party. The proximate answer points to the crushing weight of the dead hands of Frank Knight and Murray Rothbard. This only deepens the mystery because the theoretical underpinnings of libertarianism are inspired more by Austrian entrepreneurial exuberance and creative destruction than by the static world of Knight's capital theory where, since capital never depreciates, you might as well call it "land," and where it increases only as a form of conspicuous consumption. The libertarian dreamers who just want to homestead 40 acres in the woods where they can fend off all intruders can be forgiven for wanting the land tax collector to go away. The behavior of the professional economists-those who understand that society requires some minimal level of public expenditure (which, in cities at least, can be substantial)-is more difficult to excuse. A reasoned discussion of implementation problems of the single tax compared with some alternative, estimates of differential incidence of the burden, discussion of the implications for fiscal federalism and individual privacy, invocation of Adam Smith's criteria-these are the kinds of questions that have traditionally framed academic debates about taxation. The bizarre mishmash of anti-Georgist epithets-they can hardly be called arguments-suggests a visceral, rather than an intellectual, origin to the opposition. Maybe Gaffney was right.

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