'Real Estate 4 Ransom is a documentary about global property speculation and its impact on the economy. Real Estate 4 Ransom considers the changing motivations behind property investment and challenges the notion that the Global Financial Crisis was caused by bank lending alone.'

'The Landlord's Game is a board game patented in 1904 by Elizabeth Magie as U.S. Patent 748,626. It is a realty and taxation game, which is considered to be a direct inspiration for the board game Monopoly. Though many similar home-made games were played at the beginning of the 20th century and some predate The Landlord's Game, it is the first of its kind to have an attested patent. Magie designed the game to be a "practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences". She based the game on the economic principles of Georgism, a system proposed by Henry George, with the object of demonstrating how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants. She knew that some people could find it hard to understand why this happened and what might be done about it, and she thought that if Georgist ideas were put into the concrete form of a game, they might be easier to demonstrate. Magie also hoped that when played by children the game would provoke their natural suspicion of unfairness, and that they might carry this awareness into adulthood.'

'The 1909 People's Budget was a product of then British Prime Minister H. H. Asquith's Liberal government, introducing many unprecedented taxes on the wealthy and radical social welfare programmes to Britain's political life. It was championed by Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George and his strong ally Winston Churchill, who was then President of the Board of Trade; the duo was called the "Terrible Twins" by contemporaries. Churchill's biographer, William Manchester, called the People's Budget "a revolutionary concept" because it was the first budget in British history with the expressed intent of redistributing wealth among the British public. -- More controversially, the Budget also included a proposal for the introduction of a land tax based on the ideas of the American tax reformer Henry George. This would have had a major effect on large landowners, and the Conservative-Unionist opposition, which consisted mostly of large landowners, had a large majority in the Lords.'

'Anti-governmentalists often identify any tax policy with public extravagance. Georgist tax policy, on the contrary, saves public funds in many ways. By making jobs it lowers welfare costs, unemployment compensation, doles, aid to families with dependent children, and all that. It lowers jail and police costs, and all the enormous private expenditures, precautions, and deprivations now taken to guard against theft and other crime. Idle hands are not just wasted, they steal and destroy. George's program would abort other, less obvious wastes in government. It obviates much of the huge public cost now incurred to reach, develop, and safeguard lands that should be left in their natural submarginal condition. Today, people occupy flood plains and require levees, flood control dams, and periodic rescue and recovery spending. Others scatter their homes through highly flammable steep brushlands calling for expensive fire-fighting equipment and personnel, and raising everyone's fire insurance premiums. Others build on fault lines; still others in the deserts, calling for expensive water imports. Generically, people now scatter their homes and industries over hundreds of square miles in the "exurbs," or urban sprawl areas, imposing huge public costs for linking the scattered pieces with the center, and with each other. This wasteful, extravagant territorial overexpansion results from two pressures working together. One force is that of land speculators manipulating politics seeking public funds to upgrade their low-grade lands so they may peddle them at higher prices. The other force is that of landless people seeking land for homes, and jobs, and public funds for "make-work" projects. Both these forces wither away when we tax land value and downtax wages and capital. This moves good land into full use, meeting the demand for land by using land that is good by Nature, without high development costs. It also makes legitimate jobs, abating the pressure for "make-work" spending. Above all, it takes the private gain out of upvaluing marginal land at public cost. Such lands, if upvalued by public spending, will then have to pay for their own development through higher taxes.'

'Another variant is geoanarchism, in which people would live in contractual communities whose public goods are financed from land rent. The members would share the belief that the land rent should be collected and distributed to all members equally or else used for public goods. Members could secede, but would lose the package, so secession would be limited. Folks would therefore have the advantages of a state, but without the tyranny. The greater association could include “anarcho-capitalist” communities that do not use land rent for their public finance. Economic theory indicates that the geoanarchist communities would have greater prosperity, since communities that do not use land rent for public goods would find that their public works get capitalized into higher rents, making the residents pay double for public goods, once as fees and then again as higher rent. Most folks would rather pay once than twice, so they would move out of anarcho-capitalism into geoanarchism.'

'#Ending excuses for big government: Much of the government spending to which libertarians strenuously object is made necessary by its taxing productivity instead of land values. The property tax falls mostly on improvements, so less housing is built, giving the government an excuse to build public housing. Profits are taxed, leading to less employment and giving government an excuse to spend money on economic stimulus projects. Family income is taxed to the point that they have difficulty buying a house or sending their children to college, so government institutes subsidized mortgages and student loans. Even the indirect effects are substantial. Land speculations gone sour chew up inner cities, so poor people turn to crime (if drug selling and prostitution be crimes) and the government gets an excuse to beef up the police state. Even welfare increases do not stay in the hands of welfare recipients, but are quickly greeted by higher rent demands from ghetto landlords.'

'Geoism includes a moral philosophy regarding property. Human beings properly own their own bodies and lives. George therefore stated that it is morally wrong to tax wages and the products of labor. He may have been the first to say that such taxation is theft. But self-ownership does not extend to land. Geoists recognize that markets function well when the owners control the use of property, and so geoism includes individual rights to possess land. But it is not necessary for the title holder to keep the rent in order to put his land to best use. The rent is a surplus due to its better location, not to any effort by the title holder. -- Geo[anarchist] communities would join together in leagues and associations to provide services that are more efficient on a large scale. The voting and financing would be bottom up. The local communities would elect representatives, and provide finances, and would be able to secede when they felt association was no longer in their interest.'

'#Property ownership rights and their extent are a source of contention among different philosophies. Anarcho-capitalists may be strong or weak propertarians. Many critics see property rights as less absolute than anarcho-capitalists do. The main issues are what kinds of things are valid property, and what constitutes abandonment of property. The first is contentious even among anarcho-capitalists: there is disagreement over the validity of intellectual property – intangible goods that are not economically scarce. Agorists are one group of anarcho-captitalists who deny the validity of intellectual property. Some supporters of private property but critics of anarcho-capitalism may question how natural resources can be validly converted into private property (Georgism, geolibertarianism, individualist anarchism). ...thus rejecting anarcho-capitalism as a philosophy that takes private ownership of land as a morally questionable initial premise.' -- From land all issues arise.

'P.M. Lawrence also expresses a view on the general Georgist approach that I have a lot of sympathy with: "Geoanarchism, or even anything with that much of a Georgist base, presumes an enduring problem with landlordism and gives up on it, preferring palliative care." -- Land value tax is a big hammer for dealing with externalities, which can be better handled on the micro scale by user fees. It treats all the forms of rent, which are created by poor internalization of the costs of public services, as an aggregate, and then treats land rent as a proxy for all the assorted externalities and subsidies created by the community. This leaves a very weak connection between the amount one pays in taxes, and the value of any particular service (undermining, in other words, George's own distinction between a tax in form and a tax in substance), and thus weakens any incentives to economize on the consumption of particular services in light of the cost of providing them.' -- Hmm...

Bischoff: "The kind of taxation for which the school argues is the only tax that when applied does not provide less of what is taxed, namely land values. Any other tax applied causes a diminishing effect to the matter taxed." -- On America: "The only way the crises can be resolved is by returning to the gold standard, by reviving the Bill Market, by returning to the provisions of the original Federal Reserve Act of 1913, and definitely by suspending paragraph (b) of Section 14 of the act, and by repealing "legal tender" laws. Thereafter, the "invisible hand" of Adam Smith will take over and launch us on the road to an unimaginable prosperity, provided of course that the only tax collected by sovereign States and governments is Henry George's "single [land value] tax". Due to its constitution, and due to the work ethics, the general common sense and the goodness of its people, the United States is uniquely positioned to overcome the present economic and government crises."

Bischoff: "George's economic analysis has lost popularity due partly to a concerted effort by land and natural resource "owners" to protect their privilege of collecting community created land values. In this, they are aided by politicians who implement favorable tax policies and by the educational profession which has redefined land as "private" capital, thereby destroying the distinction between land and real capital. Taxation on land value reacts totally different from taxation on real capital. -- Americans have long deemed it a right to profit from community created land values. Now that land values are declining [due to deindustrialization], people feel themselves deprived of an assumed entitlement. They are beginning to wonder about the efficacy of speculating in land, particularly when it involves the land underneath their houses. It is quite likely that the present dilemma of declining land values will bring about a resurgence of the land value tax idea."

'Geolibertarianism is a political movement that strives to reconcile libertarianism and Georgism (geoism). Geolibertarians are advocates of geoism, which is the position that all land is a common asset to which all individuals have an equal right to access, and therefore if individuals claim the land as their property they must pay rent to the community for doing so. Rent need not be paid for the mere use of land, but only for the right to exclude others from that land, and for the protection of one's title by government. They simultaneously agree with the libertarian position that each individual has an exclusive right to the fruits of his or her labor as their private property, as opposed to this product being owned collectively by society or the community, and that "one's labor, wages, and the products of labor" should not be taxed. Geolibertarians generally advocate distributing the land rent to the community via a land value tax, as proposed by Henry George and others before him.'

'Georgism, named after Henry George (1839-1897), is a philosophy and economic ideology that holds that everyone owns what they create, but that everything found in nature, most importantly land, belongs equally to all of humanity. The Georgist philosophy is usually associated with the idea of a single tax on land. Georgists argue that a tax on land is efficient, fair and equitable, and can accrue enough revenue so that other taxes (which are less efficient) can be reduced or eliminated. -- ...unlike other taxes, land taxes do not distort economic activity, and do not impose an excess burden (or "deadweight loss") on the economy. A replacement of other more distortionary taxes with a land tax would thus improve economic welfare. -- Georgism, which is nowadays associated with left-libertarian philosophy, has endured criticism from those right-libertarians who believe that common land ownership would result in an infringement of the rights of self-ownership and individual property.'