The Robert Schalkenbach Foundation has released a very competently made and well produced video putting forward the economic case for Land Value Tax called "On Solid Ground", and focusing on the situation of the USA. The main thrust of the video is how and why taxing economic rent is more efficient than taxes on work and profits.

Our Vice Chairman Tony Vickers writes about George Monbiot in yesterday's Guardian.

LVT is a truly transformative Big Idea - which was OURS but is now claimed by Greens! Indeed, when I was a young Liberal, both these were ingrained in our philosophy, not just Policy..

Monbiot states "Last week I ran a small online poll, asking people to nominate inspiring, transfiguring ideas. The two mentioned most often were land value taxation and a basic income. As it happens, both are championed by the Green Party(7,8). On this and other measures, its policies are by a long way more progressive than Labour's."

Undoubtedly the most comprehensive and powerful analysis of the case for LVT and how to proceed with it here and now.

http://www.carolinelucas.com/media/fair,-efficient,-sustainable-new-report-shows-strong-case-for-land-value-tax.html

Caroline Lucas announced its publication at the ALTER fringe meeting in Brighton on 8th March. Please share the link widely, in time for advocates to use the evidence therein in their responses to our Lib Dem tax policy consultation.

Simon Tilford, of the Centre for Europan Reform, has identified the rigged property market as being the UK's biggest economic distortion, comparable in its damaging effects to the paralyzed labour market of the southern European nations. He idenifies LVT as a major component in fixing this problem, although I'm not sure I would go with him on deregulating the green belts. Still, a thoughtful article, see...

The Green Party MP Caroline Lucas has tabled a Private Members Bill....

"to require the Secretary of State to commission a programme of research into the merits of replacing the Council Tax and Non-domestic rates in England with an annual levy on the unimproved value of all land, including transitional arrangements"

Supportive article in the Guardian from George Monbiot, showing how British society is "parisitised from above" by a wealthy landowning class.

See:-

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/21/i-agree-with-churchill-shirkers-tax

The respected political monthly Prospect Magazine has published an article by ALTER's secretary David Cooper showing how landowers freeload on the productive part of the economy, diverting £100Bn annually in the UK alone from productive effort into unproductive rent seeking.

See The Rise of the Freeloaders at the Prospect Website.

The UK's Coalition Government, formed in May 2010, consists of the centre-right Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats, who are generally regarded as 'centrist'. Conservatives outnumber Lib Dems about 5 to 1 in Parliament, however Lib Dems claim that 75% of their manifesto is in the Coalition Agreement, which is the programme for government until 2015.

George Osborne is being urged by leading Tory MPs to raise council tax on mansions and expensive homes as part of a deal with the Liberal Democrats that would see the chancellor cut welfare benefits in real terms next year.

To read the full article click here

When at the Scottish Lib Dem conference in Dunfermline, we used the Monopoly board game as a prop on the stand, to explain how land monopoly creates inequalities. On seeing this our speaker, Andy Wightman the leading campaigner for Land Tax in Scotland, told me about this article in Harpers Magazine. I had been told by ALTER members that the origins of Monopoly board game were from Landlords game, but this article by Christopher Ketcham tells the full forgotten history of the board game that Henry George's ideas inspired. Its a fascinating, if rather a sad tale of how an American ideal of creating a game to teach the evils of monopoly became a victim of monopoly itself.

138 years of economic history show that Keen and Minsky are right and the mainstream economists are wrong.

"The National Bureau of Economic Research has published a new paper analyzing 138 years of economic history in 14 advanced economies, which proves that high levels of private debt cause severe recessions."

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.

I missed the media coverage at its publication a year ago but having now read this report by the intergenerational foundation, I felt I must share the headline facts with ALTER website visitors. I hope our Housing Policy Working Group read it when they were preparing the motion we passed last month in Brighton.