A correspondent sent me this yesterday, apropos the Panama “revelations” “I paid £200k for my house in 99. Now its worth £600 big ones. How much work did I do? None. How much tax did I pay? None. How much benefit did I receive? Rather a lot – All the increase in price plus improved location value. Now, multiply that by 23 million home owners and you have a nation of benefit...

An article in today’s Observer reports how quite ordinary Victorian houses in Albion Drive, Hackney (on the west side of London Fields), have continued to shoot up in value even during the recession and are now selling for the best part of a million pounds.

Imagine a feudal country where 432 families own half the land. Welcome to Scotland. This article in the Independent is about the resistance of the lairds to the proposal to break up the big estates and distribute land to small owner-occupying farmers. It is a proposal which would do nothing to address the real problem which is the private appropriation of the rent of land. Nor does it address the...

George Monbiot writes in the Guardian in support of Land Value Taxation and Basic Income.

Article in the Guardian in support of LVT by George Monbiot. Most of the comments are in support. The arguments against are scraping the barrel, so join in the fun everybody. Somewhere in there could be the prizewinner for the stupidest objection ever.

As we have pointed out many times before, the richest British-born individuals are members of the half-dozen or so aristocratic families who still own the most valuable areas of Central London. In dynamic economies, the greatest wealth is held by entrepreneurs and innovators such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates. In the British economy, a propertied ruling class sustains its wealth by playing the...