Desperate Straw Man Found. Now It's Idi Amin

I thought I'd post this link to an academic paper written by Zachary Gochenour and Bryan Caplan of George Mason University here, titled "A Search Theory Critique of Georgism".

In it, like all NCEists their main argument revolves around the fact the optimum use of any plot of land needs to be discovered, and that discovery has costs, which must be capital costs, therefore any tax upon land acts like any tax on capital i.e. there is no such thing as land rent.

Never mind there are dozens of examples of oil producing nations (including of course the UK, Norway, Libya, in fact, just about all of them) that have tax regimes in place that do tax this land rent for use as public revenue. That's ignored. Obviously.

More amusing is Caplan's assertion that any attempt to install a Georgist tax will result in a situation akin to Uganda under Idi Amin. Good KLN that. Original at least.

Anyway, the paper is littered with plenty of KLN's to keep us all entertained. But one did catch my eye, and perhaps worthy of comment.

"We do not mean to suggest that there is no merit in the idea of taxing relatively inelastic products as opposed to relatively elastic ones. However, we propose that there is nothing inherently special about land in this regard, and suggest that taxing of negative externalities (Pigou 1920, Baumol 1972) is plainly superior from an efficiency perspective."

Ignore the first KLN concerning the taxation of other inelastic products and consider his recommendation that Pigouvian taxes are plainly superior.

The thing is, LVT can be regarded as such a tax. It is the right to exclude under the law that gives land its value. We are all excluded equally (negative externalities). Under LVT we are all equally compensated.

Or we can regard monopolies as causing negative externalities. Again, LVT is just compensation for this.

Economists like Caplan flip flop around desperately trying to discredit LVT, but all they do is ultimately reveal the paucity of their arguments. It's all about protecting greed and privilege. Nothing else.