Andy Hull, a councilor just down the road from here in the London borough of Islington, is advocating a land tax (thanks, Liberal Conspiracy). This is one of those excellent old ideas that seem to disprove the maxim that inventing a better mousetrap will lead the world to your door – Hull cites Adam Smith, Tom Paine, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Henry George, David Lloyd George
and Winston Churchill in its favor, yet most places in the world have never had it. For a nice statement of the land tax’s virtues, see this piece by Martin Wolf, three years ago in the Financial Times. Continue reading →