TITLE:
Is Henry George’s Land Value Tax Fair, Efficient, Both, or Neither?
AUTHORS:
Zitong Xue
KEYWORDS:
Land Value Tax, Efficiency, Equity
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.10 No.7,
July
22,
2022
ABSTRACT: In this
essay, we believe that land value tax is efficient in the short term while
being unfair in the general term. In 1935, the United States was in the midst
of the Great Depression, and to make a living, Charles Darrow sold the “Monopoly game” to the toy manufacturer Parker Brothers (Pilon, 2015). The game became an overnight hit, but the real
inventor behind this century-old game was Elizabeth Magie, one of the followers
of George. Henry George’s book Progress and Poverty deeply influenced
Magie, “the right to use the land is like people breathing equally”. Magie
spent the rest of her life proving that George’s philosophy was right. In the
second mode of the game, Prosperity, which Monopoly never came out with, the
lands are not being owned privately. As long as someone makes money from the
trade of land, all other players can gain from it. This design reflects Magie’s
advocacy of land value tax, which rejects private ownership of land and
promotes land as the common property of mankind.