What a 19th-Century Economist Can Teach Us About Today’s Capitalism
By Chrystia Freeland

Henry George is the most famous American popular economist you’ve never heard of, a 19th century cross between Michael Lewis, Howard Dean and Ron Paul. Progress and Poverty, George’s most important book, sold three million copies and was translated into German, French, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Spanish, Russian, Hungarian, Hebrew and Mandarin. During his lifetime, George was probably the third best-known American, eclipsed only by Thomas Edison and Mark Twain. He was admired by the foreign luminaries of the age, too — Leo Tolstoy, Sun-Yat Sen and Albert Einstein, who wrote that “men like Henry George are unfortunately rare. One cannot image a more beautiful combination of intellectual keenness, artistic form and fervent love of justice.” George Bernard Shaw described his own thinking about the political economy as a continuation of the ideas of George, whom he had once heard deliver a speech.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chrystia-freeland/henry-george-capitalism_b_1997899.html

For a review of Freeland’s recent book, see the previous item in this month’s The Georgist News.

A new report on trends in house prices in Britain has just been released by Savilles. According to its annual “Valuing Britain” analysis, “The total value of the UK’s housing stock has risen slightly to £5 trillion over the past year, but housing wealth is becoming increasingly concentrated in London and the South East.”

http://www.landvaluetax.org/current-affairs-comment/why-lvt-cannot-be-a-local-tax.html