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Abstract:
The U.S. economy as well as much of the global economy will very likely fall into a depression in 2008. This booklet will explain why there will be a recession and depression by the end of the decade of 2000-2010, and why the most probable year is 2008. You will learn how you can minimize your losses or even gain from this depression, and how government policies need to change to prevent future depressions.

depression, minimize your losses, gain from this depression

Abstract:
When government intervenes in the marketplace, if often justifies the intervention as an effort to correct a "market failure" - an inability of the market to achieve potential gains from trade. Government attempts to correct market failure through regulation, taxation, and command-and-control policies. But the rationales for those policies may be waning with the emergence in various industries of new technologies that are diminishing such market failures as natural monopoly, externalities, public goods, and asymetric information.

Abstract:
Henry George was an American economist and social philosopher who wrote during the last three decades of the 1800s. He combined economic analysis with moral philosophy, as one of his themes was that there is a harmony between economics and ethics: what is economically efficient is also morally just. I will present first his economic theory, then his moral philosophy, and then apply it to policy and markets. Finally, I analyze the relationship between Georgist thought and socioeconomics.

Henry George, economic analysis, moral philosophy, economics and ethics

Abstract:
The justification for any public policies are dissolving as technology advances. New detection and metering technologies are being developed for highways, parking, marine farming, and auto emissions, making property-rights solutions viable. Information becomes more accessible and user-friendly, suggesting that quality and safety are better handled by the private sector, undercutting consumer-protection rationales. As for public utilities, new means of producing and delivering electricity, water, postal, and telephone services dissolve the old natural-monopoly rationales for control and governmental provision.

Most market-failure arguments boil down to claims about market mechanisms being blocked by transaction costs. But technology has trimmed transaction costs and made the old rationales for government intervention increasingly obsolete.

Besides trimming transaction costs, technological advancements accelerates economic change and multiplies the connections between activities. It brings fundamental upsets to even our best understandings of current arrangements and their shortcomings. Thus, by making the economic system ever more complex, it makes the notion that regultors can meaningfully know and beneficially manipulate the system ever less credible.

Technology sets what may be called an intellectual half-life on policies and their justification.

Technology, transaction costs, complexity, unknowability

Abstract:
The Lorenz curve and Gini coefficient are typically used to measure inequality. A different way to measure inequality is introduced here: I = CN, the product of concentration and number of units. The resultant index can be interpreted with reference to an inequality base where one unit owns all and the rest nothing. This inequality index also integrates the measurement of inequality, concentration, and diversification into one system, where diversification is measured as the inverse of concentration. I = CN accommodates various measures of concentration, including the Herfindahl-Hirschman and Tideman-Hall indexes. The Tideman-Hall concentration index also provides indexes of concentration, diversification and inequality as functions of Gini. As one application, the inequality index can be used to provide an index of economic development.

Abstract:
Many people study economics because they wish to understand why we have social problems such as unemployment and poverty, and how they can be remedied. Most people have similar visions of prosperity and justice. We want to live in social harmony, where everyone who wants to can work and make a good living. We would like to eliminate poverty and live in a healthy environment.

Abstract:
Prior to the passage of Proposition 13, local governments in California set their own property tax rates and received the revenues. California's Proposition 13, enacted in June 1978, severely limits the state's ad valorem real property tax. The measure limits the real property tax to one percent of the purchase price, and also limits the annual increase to two percent until the title is transferred. The proposition also shifted the allocation of the revenues from the counties to the state.

However, state laws and local initiatives have enabled cities and counties to circumvent the limitations of Proposition 13 to extract revenue from real estate with parcel taxes, special assessment districts, developer charges, and other charges. Real estate is also tapped privately to by homeowner association assessments, which play an increasingly important role in providing civic services. This paper analyzes the impact of Proposition 13 and examines these statewide and local measures to get around the tax limitation.

While the initial impact of Proposition 13 was a reduction in the state's fisc, increases in the sales and other taxes as well as local revenue sources have now restored the tax burden of Californians to slightly above the national average. Thus, the proposition has been largely an exercise in futility, centralizing government, greatly increasing the complexity of its public finances, and ultimately failing to constrain the size of government.

Proposition 13, ad valorem real property tax, allocation of the revenues

Abstract:
An ideal public revenue policy respects a person's right to privacy, does not discourage work or savings, and does not induce dishonesty. While income, sales, and value-added taxes fall woefully short of this ideal, land value taxation meets each requirement.

Abstract:
This paper examines the process of mass democracy as the fundamental cause of transfer seeking and the centralization of governance, using Austrian-school theory and methodology such as decentralized knowledge, disaggregated phenomena, and the structure of capital goods. The alternative of decentralized, small-group governance reduces the demand for campaign financing and makes more effective use of decentralized knowledge. In addition, when public revenues originate in the local districts and are passed on to higher levels of governance, it provides incentives for revenue sources which do not have an excess burden on production. The governance structure of cellular, bottom-up, multi-level voting, with public revenue flowing up from the lower to the upper levels, provides a contrast for a comparative systems analysis that can yield insight into the transfer seeking endemic in mass democracy.

Austrian economics, public choice, democracy, decentralization, public finance

Abstract:
This paper presents an analysis of what is termed "geo-rent," what the plot-devoid-of-improvements would rent for in an auction. Most of the public finance literature and current thought has disvalued and misunderstood the actual and potential role of land and its rent for public revenue. The qualities of land value that make it a superior source of revenue - having little or no deadweight loss, and capitalizing civic infrastructure and services - are recognized but compartmentalized, ignored in the broader policy discussions. That the "producer surplus" is in reality mostly land rent is little recognized. The "Henry George Theorem" that rent can optimally equal the cost of public goods is not applied to policy issues. Public finance theorists and economists generally presume that land rent is an insignificant portion of national income, whereas studies have estimated that a substantial portion of government revenue could be obtained from geo-rent. The shunting aside and disparagement of public revenue from geo-rent has distorted economic analysis and contributes to iatrogenic economy-hampering fiscal policy. The paper proposes a broader and more integrated public economics which recognizes the fundamental role of land in economies and fully incorporates the analysis of public revenue from land rent.

Henry George, land, private communities, public economics, public finance, rent, taxation

Abstract:
This article rebuts the arguments against land value taxation expressed by Oliver Marc Hartwich in the December 2006 'Economic Viewpoints'. This rebuttal argues that taxing land as a surplus is both feasible and consistent with modern economic concepts such as marginal productivity. Entrepreneurship is enhanced rather than hampered by eliminating taxes on wages and enterprise and shifting public revenue to the economic rent of land.

Abstract:
The excess burden of taxation, which in the US is over $1 trillion, could be reduced by transferring responsibility for funding infrastructure to the private sector, with a corresponding cut in taxes. While governments may resist optimal taxation, private communities are induced to do so by competition. A promising approach to efficient funding of civic infrastructure is its transfer to private enterprise.

Abstract:
Government planning of urban development is inefficient as it is controlled by political processes rather than conducted on behalf of the people it is intended to benefit. Certain forms of property rights such as divisions of freehold and leasehold can, and in practice do, lead to much more effective use of resources and provision of shared services as the owners of the freehold have an incentive to maximise site values and rents.