Moderate Land Value Taxer appointed to Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee

From today's Evening Standard:

Martin Weale was today named as the ninth member of the interest rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee at the Bank of England. The economist, who has been director of the National Institute for Economic and Social Research since 1995, replaces Kate Barker.... As an “external” member of the MPC, he was appointed by Chancellor George Osborne and will earn £96,000 a year.

From The Grauniad 8 January 2007:

... as Martin Weale, director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, puts it: "People say that not everyone is benefiting from house price rises. The problem is that house prices are rising in the first place."

Residential property is an unproductive asset. If all houses rise in price, we do not, as a society, get richer. As Mr Weale noted in a fine paper last year, rising house prices do not create wealth, they merely transfer resources from people who will own houses in the future to those who own them at present... Mr Weale and other economists say the burden of taxation needs to be shifted off income and profits and on to those untaxed gains in property values. In short, we need a land value tax.

One of the few vaguely interesting things in my long and otherwise pleasantly uneventful life was sharing a platform with Martin Weale and Chris Huhne at a pro-land value tax conference back in 2007.

Mr Huhne appears to be busy with other things, like getting lesbians back onto the straight and narrow and will probably never mention land value tax again. Mr Weale appears to have been co-opted onto the MPC for his as all-round dove-ish ness, i.e. he wants to keep interest rates low; i.e. he wants to keep asset prices (and especially house prices) inflated, so no doubt he'll have a similar Paul-on-the-road-back-from-Damascus conversion as well.