Flutterby™! : RIP Mason Gaffney

Lucky the US didn't assassinate him and install a replacement more friendly to agribusiness: New York Times obituary: Mason Gaffney, Who Argued for Taxing Only Land, Dies at 96

“To some people all taxes are equally terrible,” Professor Gaffney wrote in a 20-page paper summarizing his economic theories. But, he contended, land-value taxes are relatively virtuous and far less intrusive than income taxes.

“Land yields an economic surplus,” he wrote. “It dawns on some as quickly as a bursting tropical daybreak, and on others more like a boreal twilight, that a surplus may be taxed, and that the property tax on land garners that social surplus for the public treasury without impairing any functional private economic incentive. It may, indeed, often sharpen incentives.”